Tegile’s claims are so impressive that they scream out that something must happen to the company and to those like it. Tegile reckons that it can provide, for example, 105 TB of storage at 75,000 IOPS in 2U of space for $75,000 against equivalent I/O and capacity from NetApp that would take 115U and cost $475,000.

Tegile gets the impressive results it claims by a combination of DRAM cache, MLC and SLC storage tiers, and SAS drives. This is all cooked together with a ZFS-based OS tweaked by Tegile to provide data deduplication; compression; RAID enhancements; and a performance-boosting feature called MASS, or Metadata Accelerated Storage System. MASS effectively means that data, once ingested into the Tegile system, is dealt with pretty much via just the metadata headers rather than the full copy, and these are kept in cache or SSD tiers. See this article by Dave Raffo for a fuller rundown of the spec.

And in another example given by Tegile vice president for marketing Rob Commins, the company provided customer Virgin America with the kit it needed for $80,000 and saved it from spending $870,000 with EMC.

Such cost, performance and space advantages are rather disruptive to say the least, and it will be interesting to watch the reaction of the big vendors.

Were the world of storage marketing and sales a level playing field, the likes of EMC and NetApp would be in big trouble. They wouldn’t be able to stand a competitor offering equivalent performance at 10% to 20% of the cost of their products. But it isn’t. The power of the incumbent is huge in terms of marketing and sales, as is fear of the unknown among customers.

Of course, the likely outcome is that these innovative startups will be swallowed up by the big vendors at some point, as noted in my ‘Storage and capitalism’ blog post. Not because they pose a great threat – they’re the bite of a flea in terms of revenues diverted from the big boys – but because EMC or NetApp want their technology (or don’t want a competitor to get it).

We had an example of that recently, with EMC’s acquisition of XtremIO, another hybrid flash/disk/dedupe startup, for $430 million. EMC has incorporated it into its Project X, which aims at providing high-IOPS storage for virtual environments.

EMC is the storage market’s giant, and it surely has made the first move in a likely round of consolidation. It’ll be interesting to see who gets bought by who, how startup technologies are incorporated into big vendor roadmaps and who gets left unacquired or bought and left to wither on the vine.

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It’s useful to look at just to know who the Big Five are, for example. But we’ll also compare Gartner’s research with SearchStorage.co.UK’s 2011 storage Purchasing Intentions survey findings among UK IT departments, which provides a different top five.

Gartner’s estimates for 2011 revenues from “external disk systems” have EMC way out in front.

The Gartner top five are as follows:

· EMC: $6.279 billion and 32% market share

· IBM: $3 billion and 14.2%

· NetApp: $2.45 billion and 11.5%

· HP: $2.07 billion and 9.8%

· HDS: $1.99 billion and 9.4%

Sixth placed is Dell with $1.58 billion and 7.4%, followed by Fujitsu with $472 million and 2.2%, then Oracle with $359 million and 1.7%.

That, however, is not the ranking we usually refer to on SearchStorage.co.UK.

Instead we go on the basis of our Purchasing Intentions survey, which early last year asked 302 European storage professionals about their storage purchasing habits, including who they got their disk systems from.

The SearchStorage.co.UK top five from that survey were:

· HP: 33%

· IBM: 24%

· EMC: 24%

· Dell: 19%

· NetApp: 18%

After the top five in the SearchStorage.co.UK results are Adaptec, HDS and Oracle, all at about 11%.

What stands out in comparison of the two sets of results?

Well, the top five is almost the same. HDS drops out in the SearchStorage.co.UK results and is replaced by Dell. Does HDS have a lower market penetration in the UK compared with globally? Perhaps; it’s no scientific measure, but as a UK storage journalist it’s not a company with a high profile in the communications that come across my desk.

Also, Gartner’s research is based on revenue estimates, while ours is based on asking people whose arrays they use; and many of those in our survey — and perhaps representative of the UK IT departments as a whole — are from SMBs. About 55% of those who answered the SearchStorage.co.UK survey were from organisations with fewer than 500 employees. I would speculate here that among such smaller companies there is a higher likelihood of the chosen vendor of IT kit being the one that supplies storage in addition to servers, which would account for the good showing of HP and Dell.

The puzzling result is why in the SearchStorage.co.UK results so many vendors register a bigger share of the market. Some are the kind of soup-to-cheese board/sweet trolley vendors described above, and that would make sense among SMBs, but NetApp, HDS, etc, just don’t fit this model.

Your theories are very welcome.

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In the consumer IT world Microsoft was forced, for example, to make the use of Internet Explorer a choice rather than an obligation when you bought a PC/operating system. In the business IT world, the last decade or so has seen the liberation of the operating system from the processing hardware, most notably in the case of Unix flavours/RISC chips and their supercession by Windows and Linux on x86 servers.

Spending time talking to storage vendors at SNW Europe, it’s clear there are competing forces at work in storage too. While some vendors want to sell you the entire software/hardware stack, others want to let you buy point products that allow you to build your own system. They’re like centripetal and centrifugal forces at work – one tends to pull things together, the other flings them apart.

DataCore’s products are one example of the tendency towards a pulling apart of the storage ecosystem in a way that allows the customer greater freedom to choose what they buy. DataCore provides software products — that can reside on a dedicated server or as a virtual appliance on a hypervisor — from which one can build a full-featured storage array with, for example, thin provisioning and CDP. The disk component can comprise direct-attached drives on servers, commodity white-box arrays or existing arrays from storage vendors. DataCore can also auto-tier to anything from server-side cache to the cloud via traditional classes of spinning disk.

And you get all this for a claimed (by DataCore) cost of less than €20,000 for 10 TB of fully featured storage. You’d be hard pushed to get that for less than €100,000 from the storage market leaders, so what’s standing in the way of adoption of software-only storage products?

The key obstacle is the huge marketing machines of the large vendors, said Alex Best, DataCore’s technical business development director. But that won’t last, he said.

“People aren’t dumb, and they know they’re being ripped off every time they need to do a forklift upgrade and go through a six-month deployment project when they must move from array generation A to generation B. They used to swallow this, but they won’t in future. We’re doing for storage what VMware did for servers,” he said.

There’s no doubt that buying integrated storage products is the incumbent method of doing things. And the revenues show it. The likes of EMC, NetApp and HP’s storage division clock up tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year; the software product players added together would barely make a billion.

But then it seems to make perfect sense to allow customers the freedom to choose: to buy the intelligence of storage as a software product and add commodity drives — which are the same in every storage array — as that, as a commodity item and not as a branded expansion pack/shelf.

The big storage players clearly think their model is the correct one, that it’s what customers want. For example, IBM certified storage consultant Kurt Gerecke’s response was that customers spend the premium on products that lock software to hardware because they want to know the software will work with the hardware and will continue to do so.

“With our products the software that drives them is guaranteed to work with the hardware. The customer wants to know it is tested and will be easy to install. With software products, who will guarantee they work together? It’s a risk assessment, and most customers prefer a turnkey solution and don’t want to invest in complexity. They pay more for IBM than they would for a software-only product, but the extra cost is like an insurance fee,” said Gerecke.

Others say the driver is the channel. Warren Reid, DotHill’s marketing director, said it is the channel that pushes for integrated products. “People in the channel have told us they need a simple product, not one made of many components, with customers going to many places. They want a simple bundle they can quote on easily.”

NetApp, however, shows a slightly different approach. There’s no doubt it is wedded to huge revenues from integrated storage products but is also looking to test the waters with software-only products.

John Rollason, EMEA solutions marketing manager for NetApp, said, “There’s not the market there for DIY integration. The market is going the other way; FlexPods show this.” But Rollason also pointed out that NetApp has a limited-availability virtual storage controller for use in VMware hypervisors, the Ontap-V. “Our CTO has said we will do more along those lines,” he said. “If it became something the market wanted, it’d make sense for us to offer it.”

This is one to watch; to see whether a tiny tendency can become a movement.

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