 Hi everybody, welcome to Wikibon World Headquarters. I'm Jeff Kelly, lead big data analyst here with Wikibon. As you may have noticed, the flash market has really been heating up lately. We've seen some acquisitions in the space, most notably Fusion I.O. being acquired by Sandisk. Research firm Gartner recently came out with some market sizing around the all flash array market and showed some incredible growth over the last year or so. And of course we've got the flash memory summit coming up in just a few weeks. So thought this would be a good time to check in with Stu Miniman, who's our lead software-led infrastructure analyst here at Wikibon, has been conducting some research around the flash market to get an update. Stu, welcome. And why don't you start by saying, you know, what's going on with this flash market with all this activity? Why now? What's kind of driving some of this activity we're seeing? Yeah, so Jeff, thanks so much. We've been watching the flash market for quite a long time. We've actually looked at this more as a kind of 10-year adoption that flash is going to go on and we're almost six years into this now. And we expect to see even more innovation and much more growth over the next four years than we've seen over the last six. So as you mentioned, there's some consolidation in the marketplace going on on the server side and basically the NAND players where we're seeing some consolidation similar to what we saw on the disk side many years ago. Those familiar with the storage market probably remember when we had, you know, over 15 different disk drive manufacturers and there's three now. And we're starting to see the same thing on the flash side. So the component vendors are going to consolidate down and you have to see who's going to differentiate and who's going to be able to own that market. Of course, notably Fusion IO bought by Sandisk. Viridint was bought by HGST. You've got, you know, just a handful of players that are trying to be the next generation, not only of the component, but really trying to make a new systems business out there. So, you know, HGST, Viridint, you know, not LSI, LSI components have been acquired. Seagate, there's a number of these guys that are trying to do in many ways like what EMC did back in the 90s to create new storage players in the marketplace. And there's lots of different segments in the market. There's the server-based activity, there's the all flash array, the hybrid storage, and lots of flash going into the traditional arrays also. Let's dig in a little bit more for the non-flash expert out there. So you've got all flash arrays, you've got hybrid approaches. Can you help us understand what are the key differences there between those two different approaches to flash? Sure. So flash is really a game changer because you look, it gives you really high performance at a relatively low kind of power, but it does cost more. So the question is, if I could just build something and it was really cheap and a lot of flash, would that be what I'd want? And some of the guys that just drive nothing but flash will say, of course, that flash takes over the entire market and that disk shouldn't have any place because if I can do what we call storage efficiencies, things like compression and deduplication and thin provisioning, I can actually fit a lot more onto a flash drive and a flash array that's built with that technology than what I was doing without those storage efficiency technologies. Now, of course, some of those technologies I can use inside disk too. So it's how much data can I fit into disk versus flash. Flash, as I said, much lower power and it's starting to get greater capacities, but at least today and for the next few years, we see that the disk is still a capacity play, but performance is really where flash fits. And for a real quick cut at the data, if you look, the hybrid arrays are doing wonderfully in the small to mid market because there's only certain applications that I really need the high performance and most data, even after the first few days, definitely after the first month, 60 to 90 days, I'm not going to access it as much, so I want the cheapest place to put it. And even with all those storage efficiency pieces, I typically do want some disk. So that's kind of the hybrid markets. We were at the Nimble Storage's adaptive flash launch back about a month or so ago. They're doing quite well after their IPO. You've got companies like T-Gile and the big guys, everybody from HP with their 3PAR and IBM and EMC and NetApp are all doing well in flash on the all flash array market. This is where there's kind of a lot of attention being looked at from Wall Street because there's huge growth. As you mentioned, Gartner came out with recent numbers, said we went in 2012 from $236 million to $667 million in 2013, so almost a tripling of the marketplace. And it's really interesting to watch how fast the players are changing because in 2013, IBM was the big winner. They took the lead and they took it away from Violin, who was an early leader in that space. Pure Storage is doing quite well in that market, but then you've got companies like EMC coming on strong growth rate and their Extreme I.O. just came out with a big new update. Well, so put some of those numbers we saw from Gartner into context. So that's obviously a pretty significant growth rate up to, I think you mentioned, about $667 million market as of the end of 2013. Based on your research, you find the majority of the, whether it's all flash array or the hybrid approach installations, are they replacing more traditional storage? Are they eating away at that market, which is a multi-billion-dollar market, or are these net new installations that are kind of building on top of more traditional storage? Great question, Jeff. What we find is that typically, like many new technologies, it's a project that helps get the technology in its foot in the door. So virtual desktop or VDI was actually a very early use case. But at Wikibon, we actually think there's a limit as to how far that VDI market can grow with flash, even though it does provide some good price points for VDI. We really think that the database market, whereas there's a huge opportunity to grow and disrupt the traditional market array and the economics in the data center overall, look later this summer to see some updates from Wikibon research led by David Fleuer, who will be presenting at the Flash Memory Summit that you mentioned at the beginning of August, because Flash can eventually just allow me to reconfigure my environment so that my overall cost can go down. And anybody that knows databases knows that it's the Oracle or SQL licenses that take more than the majority of the budget there. So anything that can be done to adjust that even a little bit can have huge ramifications on the overall budget. The other thing is it's really about simplicity of the application, because if I start out of a project, but eventually I learn that I can just do things so much faster with Flash that I can do things like development faster and help roll out lots of applications in that environment. I can make my business more agile. And if it can be simpler, because operational cost is where most of the budget goes for data center as a whole, there's room for growth in that environment. So I'd say is that the all flash market, the all flash array market, it's not necessarily going to be the platform today that you can run your entire business on. A couple of examples on that solid fire was a startup in the space started in the service provider market. And they would help service providers create a tier based on that all flash array. And the service providers would have other technologies to provide the, you know, disk or capacity tier. If we look at EMC, who's the overall market leader in storage, they have the extreme IO product for the all flash array. And usually you will have another storage product for the capacity. And whether that be for backup and archiving, like with the data domain, or that the ISLON product, which has been doing quite well for scale out NAS, it's going to be a combination. So we do are tremendously bullish on the flash market, but we see disk for capacity, and even tape for capacity, living on for many years to come. So disk is not dead, but flash is going to play an increasingly important role, it sounds like. Yeah, and the big question really is, if you talk about disruption, you know, what happens to the traditional storage arrays, because they're getting eaten away by flash, they're getting eaten away by new architectures like the server sand market, that's the server base that can leverage both disk and flash. So, you know, over the next kind of two to three years, there's big disruption onto the architectures. So by the next time every user is going through their upgrade cycle, they're probably going to want to, you know, take a look at, you know, what they're doing, and they might not want to just add another box of what they've done in the past. Yeah, I just want to go back to something you mentioned earlier about consolidation happening. I mean, what's driving that consolidation is it's simply level maturity in the market. And then kind of maybe building on that, what are we seeing the more traditional storage companies do you mentioned a little bit about what the MC is doing, you mentioned IBM is kind of leading the pack in terms of the all flash array market. How are the more traditional storage companies really adapting in this new world as well? Okay, so first, when we're talking about consolidation, we're talking about the flash suppliers and absolutely it's kind of maturity of the market and, you know, lots of startups come in there or the existing players, you know, some of the new startups get just acquired in where they can fit into an existing big portfolio. And, you know, others are trying to come out of this. If we look at, you know, the three recent IPOs that happened, Fusion IO, you know, did okay as an IPO but couldn't sustain it, got bought by Sandisk. Violin, you know, has had some financial challenges to maintain their growth. And they're trying to kind of just sort out how they move forward. They put some new management in place. And they're looking to sustain their growth, maybe get some new partnerships in place. And Nimble was the other one who is built, you know, they're over 100 million. But, you know, if you look at a market that's, you know, billions and billions of dollars, there's still a relatively small player in the market. So, you know, we haven't seen, you know, that new billion dollar company that can kind of sit a seat at the table with the big traditional, kind of the big six that we look at in storage, which is, you know, IBM, HP, NetApp, EMC, Dell and Hitachi. So, you know, there's the thing about the storage market is it is very fragmented. You know, nobody really owns the market. You know, there are leaders in every segment. And, you know, strong players across the board, but storage has been a real tough one for anybody to kind of dominate. And the question is, is if we look at the end of this flash wave, how much will the big six look different? And how will there be some new players sitting at the table? Well, it'd be interesting to see. So, we've only got time for one more question. So, I want to ask you a little bit about what you've got planned. Events, research related to flash, what can we look for? You know, so, first thing as mentioned, for the Flash Memory Summit, expect to see our analysis on how flash can re-architect the data center coming out. So, by early August, we'll have that research. And from a show standpoint, the cubes actually, at least today, not planned to be at the Flash Memory Summit. The big shows that will involve flash are, of course, VMworld, at the end of August in San Francisco, and Oracle Open World, also at Musconi, about a month or so after that. So, lots of database virtualization. And, heck, cloud. Jeff and you and I will both be at AWS re-invent later in the fall. And we're starting to see flash really end up in the cloud a lot. So, that whole intersection that we say of software-led infrastructure, cloud and big data flashes a key component that fits in that entire equation. Great. Well, if the flash market is as active as it has been in the last year, in the coming year, it's going to be plenty of fodder for good research and coverage on the cube. So, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for watching. And you can always check out our research at wikibon at wikibon.org. And, of course, watch the cube live at siliconangle.tv and on demand youtube.com slash siliconangle. We'll see you here next time. Thank you.