With IDC’s (2013) data growth at ~43% per year, it would seem that Microsoft’s cloud storage is growing more rapidly than the worldwide data growth, ~14X faster! So I must conclude from Microsofts growth numbers and their implication for the rest of the cloud storage industry that maybe Alex was right, more data is moving to the cloud and this is impacting traditional storage revenues. And possibly due to the traditional storage’s higher cost and greater complexity, some of this data would never have been spun up in the first place if they had to use traditional storage, but with cloud storage so cheap, rapidly configurable and easy to use all this new data was placed in the cloud. In the “olden days”, before cloud storage, all these SQL databases and Fortune 500 data sets would have more than likely resided on NAS or SAN storage of some kind. The other interesting item from the Microsoft discussions on Azure, was that they were already hosting 1M SQL databases in Azure and that 57% of Fortune 500 customers are currently using Azure. ![]() But considering Amazon’s recent matching of Azure’s and Google’s pricing, it probably means that their growth wasn’t what they expected. ![]() I suppose Google’s cloud storage service is too new to report serious results and maybe Amazon wants to keep their growth a secret. I could find no update to Amazon S3 numbers from last year but the 10x 2.5x growth in Azure’s object count in ~8 months and the roughly doubling of request/second (In my post I didn’t mention last year they were processing 900K requests/second) say something interesting is going on in cloud storage. This year (April 2014) Microsoft mentioned at TechEd that Azure was storing 20 Trillion object and servicing 2 million request per second. I reported last August that Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 were respectively storing 8 trillion and over 2 trillion objects (see my Is object storage outpacing structured and unstructured data growth). It’s interesting that Amazon delayed their first S3 serious price reductions by about 4 months after Azure and Google Cloud Storage dropped there’s and then within another month after that, they all were at price parity. But the other thing of note is that they have all come down to about the same basic price of $0.024/GB/Month. Alex’s cloud storage pricing graph is shows how the entry of Microsoft and Google has seemingly forced Amazon to match their price reductions. Yes, as Alex has noted, the price of cloud storage has declined precipitously over the last year or so. So some customers are moving their data to shared DAS storage today, whereas before this was more difficult to accomplish effectively and because of that they previously purchased networked storage. One can see this in VMware’s VSAN, HyperConverged systems such as Nutanix and Scale Computing, as well as a general trend in Windows Server applications (SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc.) to make better use of DAS storage. Also the move to MLC flash has increased the capacity of flash devices, leading to less SSDs/flash cache cards to store/speed up more data.įinally, the other trend which seems to have emerged recently is the movement away from enterprise class storage to server storage. Somewhere in there you might want a couple 100TB of Flash to speed up IO access to these slow disks but Flash is also coming down in ($/GB) price (see SanDISK’s recent consumer grade TLC drive at $0.44/GB). Nowadays you can configure 1PB of storage with just over 170 drives. And this is also driving down the cost of NAS and SAN storage. Yesterday,s 2TB disk drive is todays 4TB disk drive and we are already seeing 6TB from Seagate, HGST and others. The other thing is that disk capacity is trending upward, at exponential rates. A little bit of flash goes long way to speed up IO access. This could definitely reduce the cost of storage systems. But any speedup of IO could potentially reduce the need for high-performing disk drives and could allow customers to use higher capacity/slower disk drives instead. Some of this is used in storage controllers to speed up IO access and some is used in servers to speed up IO access. ![]() One thing that has emerged over the last decade or so is the advance of Flash storage. Other trends impacting NAS & SAN storage adoption I believe there are a number of factors that are impacting enterprise storage revenues and Cloud storage adoption may be only one of them. Alex reports that all major NAS and SAN storage vendors lost revenue this year over the previous year ranging from a ~3% loss to over a 20% loss (Q1-2014 compared to Q1-2013, from IDC).Īlthough an interesting development, it’s hard to say that this is the end of enterprise storage as we know it. My friend Alex Teu ( ), from Oxygen Cloud wrote a post today about how Cloud Storage is Eating the World Alive. Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)
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