The Register had just published a nice article by Chris Mellor, in which he argues that lots of storage startups are aiming for a market that simply doesn’t exist or is a lot smaller than they might think:
… there is no general large scale file storage problem. Companies set up to deal with that problem have failed to set the world on fire and over-invested ones, like ONSTor and Copan, are facing difficulties.
Meanwhile, block storage SAN re-invention companies, such as 3PAR and Compellent have done better, showing up the lack of customer need for a panacea for the problem of having too many files and too many large files. The panacea isn’t needed because the general problem doesn’t exist.
The piece is obviously intended to provoke reactions; but the author does have a point. Not just because the market is so small, but also because the barrier to entry is extremely high. Nobody wants to be the first to trust petabytes of important data to an innovative new piece of hard- or software, let alone if it’s made by a relatively new company.
This doesn’t mean startups will necessarily fail; but I do expect some consolidation to take place in the next year, in which the companies that have good solutions will be bought by larger, well-known storage companies. The bidding war for Data Domain is an excellent example of this; the de-duplication technology they developed will be more easily accepted by potential customers if it’s released under the NetApp or EMC brand.
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