(Updated 3/23 – version 3)

Twinstrata, Maginatics, and Amplidata get acquired. Riverbed exits the storage business. DataGravity and Primary Data launch. HGST and Seagate continue to move into the systems business. Nutanix, SimpliVity, Cleversafe, and Scality form alliances with the global systems vendors like Dell, HP, and Cisco. Microsoft opens up their Office 365 ecosystem to other cloud storage providers like Dropbox. Qumulo and several stealth companies are continuing to raise millions of dollars and not telling us what they are doing. Box goes public (finally), the first cloud storage company to do so, and continues to trip up like Mr. Bean. Veritas, arguably the granddaddy of software-defined storage, returns as its own company. Storage unicorns run amok with SimpliVity just joining the club. And this year, we’ll finally get a look at Amazon Web Services financials instead of just clever guessing. Ho hum, just another few months in the data storage market. Overall, we had another $2.66 billion of venture dollars invested into the storage market, though this includes the record $900 million received by Cloudera and other money invested in “Big Data” companies (not covered in this map). Disruption of the traditional storage appliance market continued, cloud services grew at a steady pace, and cloud storage is now an accepted business solution. A few key patterns:

• In the worldwide disk array and external storage array market, the traditional vendors (e.g. EMC, NetApp) are being disrupted from all sides, but most noticeably from the ODM manufacturers (e.g. Quanta, Inventec) and the software-defined storage (though a large amount of it is bespoke AWS, Facebook, and Google software) that runs on these “white boxes.” According to IDC, the ODMs collectively showed the greatest amount of revenue growth (22% Y/Y) and an amazing 43% of all capacity shipped, collecting over $1 billion in Q3 2014.
• Flash arrays and converged appliances also clearly made an impact, with Nutanix reaching a $300 million annual run rate, Pure Storage approaching a $200 million annual run rate, and EMC’s XtremeIO accelerating beyond a $500 million annual run rate (though arguably on the back of cannibalizing EMC’s own DMX high-end revenue – separate article on that later). It will be interesting to see the impact of the denser, slower flash storage that Sandisk just announced in March.
• Cloud storage has had a quiet year after the aggressive price cutting in early 2014. But it is very clear that business is booming. We’ll hopefully have a closer look later in the year when AWS finally reveals their revenues, which have been estimated at nearly $4 billion by some analysts, growing 67% in the latest quarter, with “usage” growing 90%. Despite Box’s struggles to IPO and properly report earnings, they are still generating over $200 million in annual revenue, with 275,000 companies as customers. It makes me wonder how much revenue Dropbox is generating, with it’s 300 million users and 4 million businesses.

Here’s the new 2015 map. Comments are welcome as usual! 2015 Data Storage Market Map by Leo Leung is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Photo by r2hox