Storage Giants Develop Essentially Block Storage Products
StorageNewsletter.com, Monday, April 24,2023
The first element resides in the list of storage giants, who are they? Of course, we don't consider cloud providers but hardware vendors such as DDN, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Infinidat, Lenovo, NetApp and Pure Storage. The segment analyzed is the mid to high-end on-premises storage.
Then we consider block storage only, it means storage arrays that expose outside a block interface such as SATA, SAS and NVMe today. Of course in terms of transport, the array could be locally attached to the host and dedicated or networked attached with NVMe-oF or historically via iSCSI, Ethernet (like AoE for Coraid for instance) or FC. It could be from a dedicated pure block device or subsystem but also from a unified entity. We eliminate HCI of course.
Several of these vendors consider, like many people in the industry or even end-users, that block storage equals primary storage and it's a big mistake.