Weak Support of Storage Industry Following Ukraine Invasion

There are several hundreds of storage companies in the world but only 4 publicly announced sanctions following the Ukraine war, a ridiculous figure. (Maybe some others did it it but didn’t reveal their decision.)

Here there are, suspending shipments, support, sales or business operations to Russia or/and Belarus:

Fujitsu
NetApp
Pure Storage
Veeam Software

Note that Veeam was founded by Russian Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, with R&D office based in St. Petersburg, and later acquired by Insight Partners.

On its side, Huawei has been blacklisted by USA.

Russia never was a country deeply involved in storage technology but, of course, have a lot of end users. According to IDC, the shipments of external storage systems in the country increased by 12.3% Y/Y in 4FQ21 with revenue jumping by 34.2% to $212 million.

Here is a suggestion to hamper Russia: There are currently only 3 HDD manufacturers (Seagate, Toshiba and WD). If all of them agree not not sell their products in the Eastern country, it could generate big trouble for the Russian IT industry. Without HDD, no new or updated computer. But it’s possible that these disk drives could be illegally exported from China in good partnership with Russia up to now.

It will be more difficult to do the same for SSDs as there are more than 200 manufacturers in the world.

Between 50,000 and 70,000 IT professionals have left Russia recently with more to follow, according to the Russian Association of Electronic Communications.

We have discovered only two Russian companies in storage technology:

GS Nanotech, notably in SSD manufacturing, in Gusev, Kaliningrad region, and,
only one start-up, Flexify.IO in Nizhniy Novgorod, born in 2015, involved in cloud storage virtualization and migration solution, being also in Plantation, FL, getting an undisclosed amount of funding in May 2018.

We don’t know any storage company in Belarus or Ukraine.

On our side, we have decided not to send anymore our daily newsletter to all the people with emails ending by .ru and .by until the end of the war.