IBM on top of 2013 All Flash market

Gartner places IBM in the lead for 2013 all-flash array sales

(Excerpt)

Revenue from IBM’s FlashSystem product line increased 278% year-over-year from $43.4 million in 2012 to $164.4 million in 2013. IBM commanded about a quarter of the all-flash array market, as its share grew from 18.4% to 24.6%. The FlashSystem platform came from IBM’s 2012 of Texas Memory System.

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Violin Memory dropped from first in 2012 to third last year. Violin’s revenue increased by 22.6%, from $72.1 million to $88.3 million, but the company’s market share fell from 30.5% to 13.2% in 2013, according to Gartner.

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Under Gartner’s revised SSA market calculation, EMC is now able to count revenue from only its XtremIO and VNX-F arrays, which were released last November. Despite the short time frame, the EMC all-flash systems placed fourth for the year, with $73.9 million in revenue, and EMC held 11.1% of the market.

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In fifth place, NetApp all-flash revenue grew 126.5% for its EF540 all-flash array to $71 million. Nimbus Data Systems also more than doubled its revenue, from $21.6 million to $43.4 million, and placed sixth for the year, according to Gartner.

Filling out the top 10 were Kaminario ($22.5 million), Cisco ($21.4 million), SolidFire ($20.4 million) and Hewlett-Packard ($8.8 million). The total market grew 182% from 2012 to 2013, from $236.5 million to $667.3 million, using Gartner’s revised SSA reporting metrics.

According to the Gartner report, end users purchased 5,281 solid-state array units in 2013 at an average selling price of $126,360, or $9.70 per GB. The most popular capacity range was 10 TB to 19.99 TB, with a total of 2,126 units shipping at an average selling price of $118,647, or $11.59 per GB.

Runners-up were solid-state arrays in the range of 20 TB to 49.99 TB. A total of 1,629 units shipped at an average selling price of $180,699, or $8.82 per GB. Just 171 solid-state arrays of greater than 50 TB shipped last year, at an average selling price of $223,169, or $4.36 per GB. But, that could change this year now that most SSA vendors are making available arrays at higher capacities.

Tegile unveils T3400 (50% flash) and T3800 (all flash)

Tegile Systems today introduced the two latest entries into its award-winning product line that perfectly balance data management, performance and economics the T3400, which provides a flexible amount of high-density flash solid state drives (SSDs) and metadata-accelerated high-density hard disk drive (HDD) storage; and the T3800, the company’s newest flagship all-flash array that eliminates the top three customer challenges associated with offerings from other all-flash vendors.
www.tegile.com.

T3800 100% Flash SSD

The Tegile T3800 features high-density enterprise flash SSDs designed to support mission-critical applications that require extremely high performance at low latency for extended periods of time. Issues that customers typically have with all-flash storage systems are expensive price per gigabyte, short-lived components and lack of density comparative to hard-disk drive systems have been rendered obsolete with the introduction of the T3800. In a typical mixed-application environment, Tegile achieves a 5X data reduction to realize a $1/GB street price. The array’s 10PB per drive endurance allows Tegile to offer an industry-best seven-year warranty without the need for periodic wholesale system upgrades. At 55 effective terabytes (TBs) per U, the T3800 goes well beyond traditional HDD-based array density.

T3400 50% Flash SSD

Tegile’s previous flagship hybrid array had approximately five percent of its capacity in flash. With the introduction of the T3400, Tegile now offers a storage architecture featuring half of its capacity in flash SSDs and half in HDDs, resulting in a 20X increase in flash density over previous models. The T3400 base configuration includes 22TB of high-density flash storage and a 2.2TB metadata acceleration engine. Optional upgrades include HDD expansion shelves with either 24 or 72 raw TB; or SSD expansion shelves with either 48 or 144 raw TB.

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Tegile’s latest enterprise-class arrays are built on the company’s third-generation IntelliFlash technology that provides the high performance, capacity and reliability that organizations desire at a relatively low cost. Data reduction technology provides a usable capacity that’s greater than the arrays’ raw capacity. A no-single-point-of-failure architecture, automated snapshot and thin replication features make them more reliable than competitive alternatives.

Like its previous flash-driven storage arrays, Tegile’s T3400 and T3800 feature four eight-core Xeon processors, significant memory, sizable read and write caches using flash, multiple networking interfaces, dual power supplies and hot disk spares to provide high performance at low cost. The systems’ software simplifies administration and optimizes storage for various applications, including virtualization, file services and databases. All-inclusive pricing for features such as auto-snapshot, auto-replication, near-instant recovery, on or offsite failover, and virtualization management provides simplified software licensing at a fraction of the cost of storage incumbents.

Utilizing SanDisk

“SanDisk has been working diligently with Tegile to drive flash density upwards, while also addressing the durability needs of write-intensive environments, such as those presented by many Tegile customers,” said Steve Fingerhut, vice president of Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The density, performance and endurance attributes of SanDisk Enterprise SSDs utilized in Tegile’s all-flash arrays, deliver high-performance, high-reliability storage for the most demanding enterprise data center environments.”

All Tegile products, including the T3400 and T3800, are available through Tegile’s consumption-based leasing,Tegile’s Agility Pricing Program, paying only for the amount of data space utilized as low as 20.6 cents per GB a month. The program was designed for cost-conscious customers who are interested in leveraging cloud economics but who are unwilling or unable to relinquish control of their data to third-party providers at pricing competitive to Amazon S3.

Dell DX base pricing – object storage

The DX Object Storage Platform is an object-based archiving approach that is said to be easy to manage, scales seamlessly and offers plug-n-play expansion and retirement. It serves as a foundational element for Dell’s Email & File Archive offering and service as well as Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive. It deals with large amounts of unstructured data. The Email and File Archive helps companies store large amounts of data off-site.

The DX6000G, for example, is a CIFS/NFS protocol gateway for applications that use common file-based networking protocols to interact with the DX Object Storage Platform for archiving purposes. List price starts at $20,882.

Dell Compellent entry level budgetary cost for SMBs

Compellent features multi-protocol support, resiliency against downtime and disaster and the ability to reduce storage costs. Dell Compellent Storage Center 5.4 offers Dell Fluid Data storage management capabilities including: automated tiered storage, thin provisioning, thin replication, space-efficient snapshots, boot from SAN, storage virtualization and multi-site storage resource management with automated storage utilization reporting.

It comes with 6 GB SAS drives that provide twice the performance yet use nearly half the power of 3 GB SAS drives. Further, the 2.5″ SAS drives used to offer a smaller footprint. That means 6 Gb SAS enclosures provide 24 bays to accommodate twice the number of spindles in the same amount of rackspace. 10 Gb iSCSI and FCoE I/O cards and HBAs provide good interconnect performance. Live Volume acts as a storage hypervisor, mapping one storage volume to two Dell Compellent arrays at the same time. A new Series 40 controller boosts performance by 25 percent for demanding applications. Dell is targeting this product at midsize to large enterprises. The starting price is $48,000 excluding maintenance and services.

Nutanix NX-3000 pricing estimate

Excerpt from original article at InfoWorld…

Nutanix NX3000 base price

The Nutanix NX-3000 series of products provide a unique solution for virtualization deployments. Measuring this product against any other competition would be problematic as there really isn’t anything like it. It’s even tougher if you evaluate strictly on cost, which at a base price of $144,000 per appliance is significant. But the benefits — high availability, high performance, all the advantages of centralized storage without the overhead — are compelling. At the end of the day it’s an ideal solution for high-end data centers looking to pack as much virtualization capacity into the least amount of space possible.

Solidfire offers unique partitioning for cloud storage providers

Aside from it’s comparable all-Flash price of around $4/GB, Solidfire brings a unique feature to the cloud storage providers; separation of data performance by co-located customers.

Its answer is providing an all solid state solution that provides fine grain QoS control for writing firm performance SLAs, increasing VM density (up to 216 virtual machines per rack unit), and the ability to eliminate noisy neighbors. It offers in-line data reduction and up to 85 percent utilization, so a provider can use more of the system than before.

“This is a fully automated storage environment with REST-based API for complete control,” said Prassl. ”You can extend the performance knob to a customer. And you’re able to deliver that technology below the $1 per IOP range, below the $4 GB range.”

“This is a huge opportunity for the cloud service providers who only host about 10% of the compute that is possible today,” Prassl continues. “On the left hand side, you see test/dev/backup/archive – which all have low performance sensitivity. But what about apps like Oracle and SAP? SolidFire allows them to bring a high performance app to the cloud.”

Noisy Neighbors

The company says Solidfire gets rid of noisy neighbor problems when customers on shared resources start stepping on top of one another.

In terms of competition, the company sees EMC as its biggest rival, but also insists that it offers more scalability than SSD players like Nimble and Violin.” SolidFire can achieve a much larger pool of iops and capacity than others,” says Prassl.

Dell VRTX pricing brings value to converged stack computing

Dell Pricing for the VRTX is….

PowerEdge VRTX, a new converged infrastructure offering with integrated server, storage and networking technology targeted at small and midsize businesses and remote offices of midsize and larger businesses.

Dell also introduced its fifth-generation of modular data centers, which Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager for Dell servers, called the first modular data center solution targeting the broad market….

The PowerEdge VRTX features up to four dual-processor server blades, each with a maximum capacity of 768 GB of memory. It can be configured with up to 48 TB of direct-attach storage capacity, which is shared among the up to eight processors. Dell PowerConnect networking technology is also built into the small chassis.

The PowerEdge VRTX is scheduled to ship in June with an entry price of $9,999 for two blades, each with a single processor and 32 GB of memory, as well as 5 TB of SATA storage.

Paul Clifford, president of Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider and Dell partner, said the PowerEdge VRTX appears to be way ahead of the market.

“That much simplicity and power in such a small footprint,” Clifford said. “I had four of my engineers sitting at my table this morning. When they heard about it, they started grinning. After the keynote, they got together and were already talking about where they can use it.”

Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, a Boston-based solution provider and Dell partner, said the idea of a simple data center converged infrastructure with little cabling is attractive to his company’s customers. “Our engineers are really excited about it.”

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Original article at CRN

Consumption based Pricing offered by Tegile Agility Program

Tegile Systems, the leading provider of flash-driven storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, today announced its Tegile Agility Pricing Program, a capacity utilization-based model that empowers customers with the ability to leverage the performance of flash while eliminating the risk of under- or over-sizing their storage infrastructures.

Available through new Tegile Capital arm, customers now have the option of leveraging Tegile’s award-winning Zebi hybrid storage arrays and paying only for the amount of data space utilized – as low as 20.6 cents per GB a month. With the ability to finance their data storage needs with low monthly payments and no upfront costs while being billed on a usage basis, organizations can take advantage of the cost-flexible economic model that the cloud provides without surrendering control of their mission-critical data.

“Offering capacity pricing to cost-conscious customers who are interested in leveraging cloud economics but who are unwilling or unable to relinquish control of their data to third-party providers is an intelligent play on Tegile’s part,” said Eric Burgener, Research Director, Storage of IDC. “The low entry price point that this enables will certainly make Tegile’s offerings that much more attractive to particularly smaller customers that are looking to newer storage architectures to address their performance issues.”

Companies can build entire storage infrastructures, complete with hardware, virtualization software and services, and put the whole stack on a metered consumption model. Unlike other vendors that do not have the ability to provide inline deduplication and compression, Tegile’s 5:1 data reduction rates can be applied before information is saved to the arrays to effectively reduce storage costs by an additional 80 percent, taking the cost per GB down to approximately 5 cents per month.

Available via Channel Only

Like its existing purchase or standard lease options, the Tegile Agility Pricing Program is offered exclusively through the channel, allowing partners to take advantage of the leasing structure to provide their customers with the latest Zebi storage arrays while passing through utility pricing.

“The introduction of Tegile Agility pricing provides our customers with a variety of options that best fit their particular needs – outright purchase, standard leasing or a utility model that provides all of the benefits of our Zebi storage arrays while realizing the cost structure and flexibility that public cloud providers offer,” said Rob Commins, VP Marketing of Tegile Systems. “By removing the hardware purchase from their balance sheet and turning to a utility model for the amount of data actually consumed, it is a great way for customers to drop their bill while retaining the control and flexibility that they need. This is an economic model that is a win-win for all parties involved.”

Tegile versus NetApp

There’s money in confusion…and it’s YOURS!

Have you ever tried to decipher a new pricing proposal from one of the “big” storage guys? There are more part numbers than I would expect when building the space shuttle.

It is not enough to have the basic hardware broken down into dozens of pieces but then you have to select a dizzying array of software licensing options for both the array and any hosts using array features.

Here’s a sample SKU list from a major NAS/SAN vendor for a simple NAS array:

FAS6200HA-IB-BASE-1 GF-RAS56200HA,IB,1B CF,OS,R5 2
X70015A-ESH2-R5-C DS14MK2 SHLF, ACPS,14x144GB,15K,HDD 5
X6524-R6-C CBL, 2M, Optical, Pair, LC/C,-C,R6 2
X6530-R6-C CBL,0.5M,PATCH,FC SFPTO SFP-C,R6 6
X1941A-R6-C CBL,5M,CLUSTER4X,CU-C,R6 2
X871A-R6-C 20A Storace Equipment Cabinet,-C,R6 1
X875A-R6-C 20A PWR CORD (4),CABINET, NEMA-S,R6 1
X800-42U-R6-C Cabinet Component Power Cable, R6 14
X5517-R6-C Storage cabinet, Rail Set,42U,-C,R6 1
X6529-R6-C SFP, Optical, Pair, LC/LC, -6, R6 4
X8773-R6-C Multiple Product Tie-Down Bracket,- 2
SW-T4C-CIFS-C CIFS CIFS Software, T4C-C 2
SW-T4C-ISCSI-C iSCSI iSCSI Software, T4C-C 2
SW-T4C-NFS-C NFS NFS Software, T4C-C 2
SW-T4C-SRESTORE-C SnapRestore Software,T4C,-C 2
SW-T4C-SME-C SnapManager Software, Exchange, T4C 2
SW-T4C-SMSVS-C SnapMirro-SnapVault Software Bndl, 2
Software (Host Side)
SW-SDR-WIN SnapDrive, Windows 10
SW-SSP-SDR-WINDOW SW Subs SnapDrive for Windows 3.0 10
SW-SMBR-1000PK Single Mbox Recovery, 1000pk 1
SW-SSPVN-SMBR-1000PKendor SW Sub SMBR, 1000pk 1
SW-SDR-SOL-TIER1 SnapDrive, Solaris, Tier 1 10
1-2CPU
SW-SSP-SDR-SOL-TIER1SW Subs, SDR Solaris Support, Tier 10
SW-SDU-CPU SW, SnapDrive UNIX, CPU 5
SW-SMO-CPU SW, SnapManager Oracle, CPU 5
SW-SSP-SMO-CPU SW, SUB, SnapManager Oracle 5
Services and Support
CS-S-INST Initial Installation-DS14 1
CS-A SupportEdge Standard-FAS270 Mths: 3 2

Wow!

All we wanted was a high-performing storage array.

Instead, we got a dissertation on what the sales person thinks we need. Notice that this proposal contains base hardware, base software, host software, installation services and support. Although this would be considered a “simple” configuration, it is still complex and a potential customer would be hesitant to make any changes or delete any proposed features.

What’s missing?

What’s worse is if the customer proceeds with this proposal thinking they have “covered all their bases” for the future. However, since many projects increase in complexity over time, new features may be needed but this a la carte model requires the customer to re-budget and purchase additional options in the future…more money.

Tegile Systems’ approach eliminates complexity

Compare this nightmare configuration with how Tegile sells their arrays; single SKU and all-inclusive.

Here is a typical Tegile configuration for a fault-tolerant (no single point of failure) 22TB system with SSD and HDD drives.

SKU	Description	Qty
HA2100 22TB	The Zebi HA2100 is a 2U hybrid NAND flash/SATA drive array designed to manage large-scale projects. Software stack includes de-duplication, compression, thin provisioning, snapshots, remote replication and application profiles. – 22 TB Raw Capacity – 48 GB DRAM – 600 GB SSD (Flash) – (12) 1 GbE data ports, (2) IP-KVM management ports	1

I like to call this the single most important business feature of Tegile pricing; all inclusive pricing. Everything you will need, now and in the future, is included at no additional charge. When you install the unit and fire up the GUI you will notice that there are no features “greyed out”. This is fantastic for projects that evolve because when you need a feature, its available. Simply configure it!

Want to save money? Consider eliminating complexity with Tegile low cost, high-performing hybrid arrays.

Tegile’s new HA2400 and HA2800 Zebi arrays

Read the full article at Network Computing

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Tegile’s Zebi unified storage systems use a multitiered cache architecture where DRAM and flash are used as cache in front of 7,200 RPM nearline SAS drives. The Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS) combines thin provisioning, compression and data deduplication with an efficient redirect-on-write snapshot provider to optimize the use of both flash and trash (the 7,200 RPM drives). Since most of the active data will be cached in the SSDs, data reduction shouldn’t have a significant performance impact but will bring the effective cost per gigabyte stored from about $15 to $3 or $4 dollars.

The HA2400, which comes with 96 Gbytes of DRAM cache, 10 200-Gbyte SSDs and 14 1-Tbyte disks at a $168K MSRP; and

The even faster, all-solid-state new HA2800F, which has 22 200-Gbyte SSDs and can deliver a claimed 200,000 IOPS.

Each system can be expanded with drive shelves containing both SSDs and disks or a high-density, disk-only shelf that holds 72 Tbytes in 4u. Tegile pricing is very competitive.