For All-SSD Systems, EMC Leader in Revenue, IBM in Capacity Shipments - IDC

Here is an abstract of the IDC Corp.‘s report Worldwide All-Flash Array and Hybrid Flash Array 2014-2018 Forecast and 1H14 Vendor Shares (November 2014, IDC #252304e, 42 pages, $25,000)
By IDC’s analysts Eric Burgener, Iris Feng, Jeff Janukowicz, Eric Sheppard, and Natalya Yezhkova

The flash-based array market, which includes both all-flash arrays (AFAs) and hybrid flash arrays (HFAs), is on fire. In the first half of 2014, the combined markets grew at noticeably higher rates than what IDC had forecast it to grow with previous projections. Individually, each market segment also outgrew our 2013 forecast projections.

In addition:

Across the board, vendors are aggressively flash optimizing their offerings to provide improved flash-based array platforms are offering enterprise data services, which include snapshots, clones, encryption, replication, and QoS, as well as storage efficiency features like in-line compression and deduplication and thin provisioning. This rich set of offerings is moving the deployment paradigm for flash-based arrays away from the traditional ‘dedicated application’ model toward that of mixed workload consolidation.
There is no question about the importance of flash’s future in the datacenter. Although the initial market entrants with flash-optimized offerings were all start-ups, at this point, all the traditional enterprise storage vendors, ship all-flash configurations of their HFAs as well, and several, have AFAs. Start-up revenue leaders in the flash-based array space had their hegemony challenged as EMC and IBM entered the market with their own AFAs and grew their revenues at rapid rates.
IDC’s guidance is clear. If you are a flash-based array vendor, make sure you have a flash optimized platform that offers in-line compression and deduplication as well as other enterprise data services. If you are an end user, you should be considering flash-based arrays when the time has come to retire your existing enterprise storage platforms.

All-Flash Arrays

WW All-Flash Array Revenue by Vendor, 1H14
(in $ million)

Vendor	Revenue	Share
EMC	112.3	22.6%
Pure Storage	90.9	18.3%
IBM	82.9	16.7%
NetApp	45.0	9.1%
SolidFire	35.6	7.2%
Nimbus Data	34.3	6.9%
Other	95.3	19.2%
Total	496.3	*100%*

Note: Data includes the value of the entire system but excludes channel markup.

WW All-Flash Array Raw Capacity Shipments by Vendor, 1H14
(in terabytes)

Vendor	Shipments	Share
IBM	22,773.0	27.3%
EMC	13,404.5	16.1%
Pure Storage	7,557.9	9.1%
SolidFire	7,525.7	9.0%
Nimbus Data	7,501.3	9.0%
Violin Memory	5,583.9	6.7%
Other	19,130.0	22.8%
Total	83,476.3	100%

Editor’s note: Strangely NetApp is ?4 in revenue share but not in the ranking for capacity shipments

Hybrid Flash Arrays

WW Hybrid Flash Array Revenue by Vendor, 1H14
(in $ million)

Vendor	Revenue	Share
EMC	1,575.8	35.5%
NetApp	891.8	20.1%
Hitachi	521.2	11.7%
IBM	408.7	9.2%
Dell	211.3	4.8%
HP	113.5	2.6%
Other	715.6	16.1%
Total	4,437.9	100%

Note: Data includes the value of the entire system but excludes channel markup.

WW Hybrid Flash Array Raw SSD Capacity Shipments by Vendor, 1H14
(in terabytes)

Vendor	Shipments	Share
EMC	45,273.7	22.6%
Dell	44,637.7	22.3%
Hitachi	37,490.3	18.7%
NetApp	22,209.5	11.1%
IBM	18,368.5	9.2%
HP	7,511.9	3.8%
Other	24,474.8	12.3%
Total	199,966.4	*100%*

Note: Data excludes HDD capacity.
(Source: IDC, 2014)

For All-SSD Systems, EMC Leader in Revenue, IBM in Capacity Shipments – IDC

Start-up Pure Storage not too far behind