All-Flash datacenter — hyperconvergence and web-scale

Pathfinder report

Published April 2016

The enterprise storage market has had a relatively sheltered existence over the last few decades with few opportunities for market disruption despite the extraordinary technology developments that have taken place in this area. Competition within the storage market was limited to incumbents and startup players, which entered with the same proprietary array mindset as their predecessors and used similar pricing and partnership strategies to gain market share.

In the past three to five years, however, hyperconverged platforms and cloud services have risen to become legitimate alternatives to traditional storage systems. They have shown enterprises, midsized companies and service providers that storage does not have to be confined to proprietary external arrays. Flash has become another major game changer in the storage market. It has allowed startups to upend monolithic tier one disk arrays by delivering high performance with undeniable efficiency and management benefits.