Top 10 Storage Vendors with Staying Power

Technology vendors come and go. Remember McData and CNT? Or how about DEC and Wang? The billion-dollar bidding war between Dell and HP has the rumor mill working overtime as 3PAR’s fate hangs in the balance. It’s unclear which storage vendor will be next on the auction block, but which companies will be around for the long haul?

HP

HP recently took top spot from IBM in server sales, it dominates in fields such as printers and ink, and it’s pretty big in storage too. While you hear rumors about all sorts of major players being gobbled up, HP is firmly positioned as one of the gobblers.

IBM

Big Blue is another of those select few at the top of the food chain. It has such a wide range of technologies at its disposal, has a mainframe monopoly and a huge R&D budget. It isn’t going anywhere.

Microsoft

Another of the untouchables. Microsoft is not quite as dominant as it was a decade ago. Certainly, in the consumer sector, Apple has stolen much of its thunder. But Microsoft has quietly been establishing itself in the enterprise marketplace. It is a major force now in enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM and, of course, storage. It may well add more storage riches to its already vast wealth.

Cisco

Since its entry into storage a decade or more back, Cisco has become a significant presence. Expect Cisco to get even bigger in storage, not smaller even bigger in storage, not smaller.

Oracle

This company has been in storage for less than a year yet it is already one of the big boys. Far from dumping its storage assets, Oracle just announced a major upgrade to its StorageTek tape libraries. Look upon this as a sign of things to come.

“Oracle has the apps, database, server, switches and storage,” said Terri McClure, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, who attended an analyst briefing for Oracle systems and storage. “They have a real converged computing story, and the management team we saw over the past two days was very impressive. It took away any doubt I had about Oracle’s commitment to the Sun storage portfolio.”

Intel

A chipmaker on the list of storage vendors with longevity? Yes. The x86 chip architecture just conquered EMC – it has switched all its storage arrays from RISC-based processors to Xeon multi-core – and it is used by most of the storage world. It is forming partnerships with all the companies covered above and will increasingly become a force in storage.

Dell

Dell, too, is doing well in storage via acquisitions and partnerships. It may well corner the low-end commodity storage hardware market. Since the success of its EqualLogic acquisition, Dell has picked up Exanet, Ocarina Networks and Scalent, and is in a bidding war with HP over 3PAR a bidding war with HP over 3PAR.

“Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle are safe given their size,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO Group. “However, all will have to continue to grow their revenues and not simply cut costs to be profitable as well as do more acquisitions.”

Notice anything about the above list of long-haul storage vendors? It doesn’t have a single mainline storage vendor on it. Could it be that doing just storage is a liability these days? Perhaps that’s why so many acquisition rumors focus on EMC, NetApp and Brocade. But there is hope.

EMC

As the king of the storage mountain, the name EMC is likely to be with us for a while. “EMC will be around most likely with their name intact unless eaten up by the likes of an IBM or HP and even then it would be a crime to lose the brand name awareness,” said Schulz. “EMC can survive as its own company by continuing to grow organically as well as via acquisitions and partnerships.”

NetApp

NetApp is another one that analysts see surviving. Schulz thinks it can even become the “next EMC” if it gets aggressive and makes some nontraditional acquisitions meaning they jump into some different segments.

“Perhaps they should buy or do a reverse merger with Symantec,” said Schulz. “NetApp reminds me a lot of the EMC from the mid to late 90s that was growing but needed to further diversify, thus there is a lot of upside potential.”

McClure is another fan of NetApp.

“You can’t argue with the results,” she said. “They have a great long-term vision, but don’t do a good job letting the broader market know what it is. I’ve seen it, and it’s compelling and seems to be on target.

Isilon

OK. All of the above names could be considered safe bets, which is understandable given the subject matter. So McClure stuck her neck out and picked a possible winner from the chasing pack.

“There is a renewed energy and focus at Isilon,” said McClure. “They are at an intersection point with the market, which is shifting to scale-out architectures to manage increasing amounts of machine generated data.”

Supporting her contention is the fact that the company’s market value has soared to more than $1 billion. It recently announced two new software applications known as SmartPools and InsightIQ and has a big announcement planned for VMworld at the end of this month, which concerns the second part of its unified scale-out storage platform.

Drew Robb is a freelance writer specializing in technology and engineering. Currently living in California, he is originally from Scotland, where he received a degree in geology and geography from the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Server Disk Management in a Windows Environment (CRC Press).

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