2018 Partner Programs Guide: 5-Star Storage Vendors

@TheChannelCompany Storage Wars The storage system industry has been undergoing some serious consolidation in recent years with @Dell's $67 billion acquisition of storage systems giant @EMC in 2016, @Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $1.09 billion purchase of flash and hybrid storage developer @Nimble Storage last year, and @Western Digital's 2017 acquisition of flash storage maker @Tegile Systems. Meanwhile, all-flash/hybrid storage upstarts like @Pure Storage and @Tintri continue to challenge the established players while hyper-converged system developers like @Nutanix are challenging stand-alone storage system makers. And cloud storage service providers, from @Carbonite to @Amazon Web Services, and developers of #softwaredefined storage technology are challenging the very concept of on-premise data hardware systems. For solution providers, the challenge is deciding which vendors to work with. While a vendor's technology portfolio is a big part of that decision, so is a vendor's partner program and the perks, resources and assistance it offers solution providers to help them navigate the rapidly evolving data storage market. Here we present the 5-Star designees in the storage technology space.

https://www.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300101511/2018-partner-programs-guide-5-star-storage-vendors.htm

Excitable backupper Exagrid eyes IPO

@Exagrid says it's steering a methodical path to an eventual IPO unlike reckless cash-burning storage startups that fail or need to be acquired (rescued). It says its final 2017 quarter was a blast with record bookings and revenue, rounding out a record bookings and revenue year. It gained more than 100 new customers in the quarter, a record number with a first purchase order in the six-figure range, and it opened offices in the Czech Republic, Israel and Australia. The competitive landscape has @Dell EMC #DataDomain as the giant in the space. But @Exagrid CEO and president @Bill Andrews claimed: "We are replacing more and more Data Domain installations. We are seeing @HP #StoreOnce less and less..." And @Rubrik? "We see Rubrik when the customer is looking to replace their backup application. We see Rubrik moving away from selling hardware so we hope that one day we can actually work with them." The @Nutanix #AHV base looks like an opportunity. "We see a great opportunity ahead of us working with the @Comtrade Software's HYCU product to penetrate Nutanix environments running the Nutanix AHV hypervisor versus @VMWare." Exagrid is scaling up its in-house sales effort. "We are in the process of doubling our inside sales team that prospects to find new opportunities. We have one calling centre in the US (Westborough, Massachusetts) and just opened up a second (Bedford). We are also opening up a call centre in Dublin, Ireland." A year ago Exagrid also announced a record fourth quarter, and talked about the possibility of an IPO. Andrews now says: "We are methodically building a sustainable company that can go public. We have met with over a dozen investment banking firms and know exactly what we have to do. "We are very different from all the other backup and storage companies that run hard, burn a ton of cash to grow their top line and then hit a wall and have to sell the company or close their doors such as Tintri, Tegile, Violin, Simplivity, Nimble, and many others." ®
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/08/exagrid_ipo_hopes/

Less than 6 months after its IPO, storage firm Tintri considers selling ou

Less than six months after going public, storage firm Tintri Inc. today said it’s considering a sale of the company following a second straight quarter of disappointing results. In a surprise move, the Mountain View, California-based company said during its third-fiscal-quarter earnings conference call that it’s looking at a potential sale or options to reduce its cash burn significantly. “We are exploring strategic options available to the company to deliver value to our stockholders, including retaining investment bank advisors to assist us in this process and optimizing our operating model to reduce our cash burn rate and shorten the time to generate positive cash flow,” Chairman and Chief Executive Ken Klein said in a statement. Shares of Tintri plunged as much as 14 percent in after-hours trading, though later after the earnings call, shares were up 0.36 percent. They had fallen by the same fraction in regular trading, to $5.48 a share. After another disappointing quarter reported in September, shares had plummeted 13 percent. The nine-year-old company makes storage appliances using all flash-memory chips. They’re intended for virtual machines, or computers emulated in software, and software containers, which bundle an application and other software so it can run on multiple computer operating systems as needed. Both are ways to save money and provide more flexible data center setups in the rapidly developing cloud computing era. In its quarter ended Oct. 31, Tintri reported revenue fell 6 percent from a year ago, to $31.8 million. That was far below the $36.6 million analysts on average had forecast. The company also lost $37.9 million, or $1.21 a share, higher than the loss of $23.8 million, or $6.87 a share, a year ago. The adjusted loss, not including certain costs such as stock compensation, was 79 cents a share. For the fourth quarter, Tintri forecast an adjusted loss of 79 to 83 cents on revenue of $25 million to $27 million. Analysts were modeling 68-cent loss on revenue of $42.9 million. Klein blamed the shortfalls on delayed and reduced purchases by some accounts, though he added that some of those delayed transactions closed in November. During the earnings call, oddly, analysts didn’t ask about the potential sale of the company, but they did have many questions about sales momentum. “Many of the purchase delays that we’ve seen stem primary from concerns about the strength of our balance sheet, which we are addressing, and to a lesser extent realignment of our sales force, which naturally takes some time,” Klein said, adding that the main shortfalls in revenue came from midsized customers who have bought between $400,000 and $1 million worth of products. “We believe that our model can be fully funded through cash generation.” Klein also emphasized that Tintri continued to gain customers, adding 77 to top 1,500 total. He also cited several instances in which he said @Tintri beat out competitors such as @NetApp Inc., @Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s @Nimble Storage unit and @Dell EMC. Analysts and investors were downbeat on Tintri even before its IPO, though it’s unusual for a company to consider selling out so soon after going public. The company faces heightened competition from both traditional storage companies and younger upstarts, many of which are rapidly consolidating into bigger entities. For one, NetApp Inc. acquired all-flash storage provider SolidFire in early 2016. Then there was Dell Inc.’s massive acquisition of EMC Corp. that closed in September 2016. In February, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. acquired SimpliVity Corp., a developer of competing hyperconverged systems. And in April, HPE struck another blow by buying Nimble Storage Inc., another all-flash storage provider, for more than $1 billion. Tintri had raised $61 million in its IPO June 30, but the $7-a-share price at which it debuted, down from its planned range of $10.50 to $12.50 a share, gave it a valuation of only $216 million. That was far below the $785 million valuation in its last venture capital round in July 2015. At the time, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Kieran Harty told Fortune explained the so-so reaction of investors to other enterprise infrastructure companies that weren’t doing that well. “It is kind of like being in a good house in a bad neighborhood,” he said. Before the IPO, Tintri had raised more than $260 million, including a $75 million round in early 2014, a $125 million funding in August 2015 and a secondary round of an undisclosed amount in January.

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Swisscom-Enterprise-Service-Cloud-Leverages-VMware-Cloud-Infrastructure-and-Management-to-Accelerate-Time-To-Market-1011205259

Scale-out NAS Market Top Vendors Dell, Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nasuni Corporation, NetApp, Inc., Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, IBM Corporation Dominating the Industry By CAGR of 22.63% During 2017-2024

Global #ScaleoutNAS Industry 2017 Market Research Report focuses on price, sales, revenue and growth rate of each type, as well as the types and each type price of key manufacturers, through interviewing key manufacturers. Second on basis of segments by manufacturers, this report focuses on the sales, price of each type, average price of Credit Insurance, revenue and market share, for key manufacturers. Global Scale-Out NAS Market accounted for USD 10.42 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 22.63% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. The upcoming market report contains data for historic year 2014, 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024.  Get a Free Sample Copy Of Report @ databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=globa... Global Scale-out NAS Market By Geography; Component (Software, Service); Storage Technology (File Storage, Block Storage, Object Storage); Deployment Type (On-Premises, Cloud); Organization Size (Large Enterprises, Small & Medium Enterprises {SMES}); Vertical (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI) , Consumer Goods & Retail, IT & Telecom, Energy, Healthcare, Government, Manufacturing, Education & Academics) – Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024 Major Market Competitors : • @Dell, Inc., • @Hewlett Packard Enterprise, • @Nasuni Corporation, • @NetApp, Inc., • @Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, • @IBM Corporation, • @Panasas, Inc., • @Pure Storage, Inc., • #Tintri, Inc., • @Scality, Inc., • @Nexenta Systems, Inc., • @Quantum Corporation, • Among others. Get A Detailed TABAL OF CONTENT OF MARKET@ databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=global-scale-nas-m... Major Market Drivers and Restraints: • High Cost and downtime of scale-up NAS • Rising need for high throughput rate • Big data analytics • Increasing demand for scale-out NAS applications across enterprises • Lack of technically skilled personnel Key Questions Answered in Global Scale-out NAS Market Report:- Our Report offers:- What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Scale-out NAS Market in 2024? What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Countries Global Scale-out NAS Market? What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Scale-out NAS Market? Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Scale-out NAS Market? Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Scale-out NAS Market? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin and Market Share What are the Global Scale-out NAS Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market? Market Segmentation: On the basis of component:- Software, and service. The software segment is further sub segmente:- High performance computing, data management & integration, data protection, big data, and in-memory datagrid. The service segment is further sub segment :- It module, electrical module, and mechanical module. The services segment is further sub segmented into professional services, and system integration. On the basis of storage technology:- storage, block storage, and object storage On the basis of deployment type:- On-premises, and cloud. On the basis of organization size:- Large enterprises, small & medium enterprises (SMEs). On the basis of vertical:- Banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), consumer goods & retail, IT & telecom, energy, healthcare, government, manufacturing, education & academics, and others. On the basis of geography:- North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market. Competitive Analysis : The report for Global Scale-Out NAS Market include detailed vendor level analysis for market shares in 2016 for Global, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and South America specifically. Also impact and development analysis of key vendors is registered in the market and factored on the basis of Vendor Positioning Grid Analysis which measures the vendors strengths and opportunities against present market challenges, measure providers ability to identify or satisfy present market needs, map providers market vision to current and upcoming market dynamics among others. The report also measures technology life line curve and market time line to analyze and do more affective investments. Read more about This Report @ databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-scale-nas-mar... About Data Bridge Market Research: Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process. Contact: Vishal Dixit Data Bridge Market Research Tel: +1-888-387-2818 Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.com Investor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.com Visit Blog databridgemarketresearch.com/blog/ Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/data-bridge-market-research

https://www.openpr.com/news/811615/Scale-out-NAS-Market-Top-Vendors-Dell-Inc-Hewlett-Packard-Enterprise-Nasuni-Corporation-NetApp-Inc-Hitachi-Data-Systems-Ltd-IBM-Corporation-Dominating-the-Industry-By-CAGR-of-22-63-During-2017-2024.html

Learn more about the all-flash storage vendors that appeared in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report.

Gartner recently released a Magic Quadrant (MQ) for all-flash storage arrays. Gartner analyst Valdis Filks said the overall solid-state array (SSA) market grew by 72 percent and generated revenues of $4.6 billion in 2016. This growth is being fueled in part by the purchase price dropping 40 percent or more in the last 18 months. “Most of the traditional incumbent and system vendors have transitioned their overall storage array businesses to SSAs, where more than 50 percent of new storage array sales are SSAs,” said Filks. “Solid-state arrays have moved to highly integrated application development platforms with agility features such as many different types of data copies, backups, migrations and services for applications within containers.”  Here's in-depth look at the top ten vendors from the MQ. Pure Storage Pure Storage achieved pride of place among vendors in the Leaders quadrant. This is due to what the analyst firm considers the completeness of its vision as well as its ability to execute. Part of the reason for this is that Pure Storage didn’t exist until 2007. It has only ever built and sold all-flash arrays. Pure has two primary product families: FlashArray and FlashBlade. Within the FlashArray family are FlashArray//M, optimized for accelerating any business application and structured workloads, and FlashArray//X. “Our FlashArray family of all-flash block storage arrays are deployed all the way from tier 1, mission-critical environments running business and transactional workloads such as Oracle, SQL and SAP, through to deeply consolidated and automated private and hybrid cloud environments,” said Jason Nadeau, senior director of products, Pure Storage. “In addition, FlashArray//M serves as the storage component for FlashStack, our converged offering with Cisco.” FlashArray//X is the company’s newest offering and is an all-NVMe array. Existing FlashArray//M systems, meantime, are engineered to be upgradeable to NVMe. The company expects NVMe to follow a similar trajectory to flash itself — an expensive, niche media to start, which is then democratized and becomes industry standard. Overall, FlashArray offers capacity from 5 TB to 512 TB raw (from 15 TB to 1.5 PB effective), a data reduction average of 11:1 (including thin) or 5:1 (not including thin). and pricing starting at $50,000. FlashBlade, optimized for unstructured data, is finding traction in life sciences/genomics, healthcare, self-driving car simulations, rockets and supercomputing. It tends to be sold as much into research and development teams as traditional IT functions, with an emphasis on emerging workloads like artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning. It offers capacity from 56 TB to 3.9 PB raw (from 98 TB to 8 PB effective), a data reduction average of 3:1, bandwidth from 7 GB/s up to 75 GB/s, and pricing starting at $150,000. Dell EMC #DellEMC is another vendor includes in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant. Its flash storage options include deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, snapshots, encryption, replication and other security features. “With all-flash, you get the speed, agility and scale you need to react to changing markets and customer demands,’ said Jeff Boudreau, president, Dell EMC Storage Division. The Dell EMC all-flash portfolio was recently refreshed with midrange (Dell EMC #Unity, #SCSeries), high-end ( #XtremIO and #VMAX ) and #softwaredefined ( #ScaleIO ) products, as well as unstructured data storage ( #Isilon ). The new VMAX 950F is said to be 68 percent faster and offer 30 percent better response times (6.7 million IOPS, 350 microseconds response times for OLTP) than the previous generation (VMAX 850F). It is best for the consolidation of mission-critical applications, such as core banking, credit card processing, electronic billing or hospital record systems. The XtremIO X2 is designed for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and large-scale snapshot use cases. It is said to have three times higher capacity, 25 percent better storage efficiency on average and 80 percent better response times than first-gen XtremIO. The X2’s rack density has been increased by four times from the previous generation, providing up to 5.5 PB effective capacity and a capacity density of over 100 TB effective per rack unit. Further, Dell EMC Unity All-Flash storage models feature up to four times larger file system capacity (up to 500 TB), eight times the density and sub-10-minute deployment compared to the previous generation. “Dell EMC flash storage arrays have been repositioned to move the block-only XtremIO family into more specific niche market segments,” said Filks. “The unified (block and file) VMAX All-Flash and Unity All-Flash families are being strategically positioned for diverse high- to midrange applications, and the Isilon file and object systems now have a full-flash model.” HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is yet another Leader, according to Gartner. It has a couple of all-flash product lines. Nimble Predictive AF units are at the high end and can be deployed in multi-petabyte environments. Gartner said that user satisfaction from this technology (acquired from Nimble) is high. In addition, InfoSight Predictive Analytics offers remote monitoring and analytics to identify issues within and outside of the storage infrastructure. HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays are aimed at the lower end of the market. Although larger 3PAR units have good capacity and IOPS capabilities, the smallest 3PAR configuration is best suited for environments with modest capacity and IOPS requirements. Both product lines feature deduplication and compression, as well as scale-up or scale-out options. They can take advantage of NVMe Peripheral Component Interface Express (PCIe) SSDs and storage-class memory without a major upgrade. And with HPE now aggressively rolling out Nimble products, they should gain more traction by taking advantage of a strong HPE channel partner ecosystem. NetApp NetApp is another company that Gartner classifies as a Leader. Its All-Flash FAS A-Series (AFF) is the high-end line. It includes ONTAP data management and comes with 15 TB SSDs and up to 7 million IOPS per cluster with sub-millisecond latency, plus 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) and 32Gb Fibre Channel connectivity. Inline deduplication and data compaction are also part of the package. In addition, SolidFire all-flash arrays are said to provide guaranteed performance to thousands of apps on one shared storage system. Users can mix and match nodes to right-size performance and scalability. Finally, NetApp EF-Series all-flash arrays run on the SANtricity software platform, which is aimed at environments with extreme demands for latency-sensitive workloads. EF-Series products include automated path failover, online administration, data protection, proactive monitoring and repair, nondisruptive upgrades and diagnostic capabilities. IBM Storage IBM has a large collection of solid state arrays, which helped propel the company into Gartner’s Leaders quadrant. IBM SSAs include the A9000, DS8000 series, Storwize series and the V9000. The IBM FlashSystem A9000 series leverages XIV storage system software technology, as well as deduplication and compression. FlashSystem products use IBM's flash module technology to optimize flash drive components for performance and reliability. Software-defined storage features from IBM Spectrum Storage offer additional functions, such as hybrid cloud support. “IBM has a broad portfolio spanning high-performance customer needs, including mainframe environments as well as entry-level and midrange products,” said Filks. “IBM Spectrum Storage software suite allows customers the flexibility to manage IBM and/or external storage solutions, and hybrid cloud support.” IBM’s family of all flash arrays are available to enterprises and small companies. They range from ultra-low latency (FlashSystem 900, FlashSystem V9000, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Storwize V7000) to more cost-effective models such as the Storwize V5030F and Storwize V7000F. “With the maturity level that flash has reached in the past 24 months, flash can be deployed in any size company for their primary storage needs,” said Eric Herzog, vice president of worldwide storage channels, IBM. “Spectrum Virtualize software allows a client to improve hybrid cloud and storage deployment flexibility, enjoy consistent management for on-premises and cloud storage regardless of storage type, replicate from on-premises storage to cloud storage.” IBM Spectrum Virtualize software supports almost 400 different storage systems. Further features include storage pooling, automated allocation with thin provisioning, automated tiering, software encryption, local and remote replication, support for moving snapshots from existing storage to public cloud providers, data mobility between data centers and support for virtual environments. Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is another vendor that sits in the Leaders quadrant. The HDS Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) includes the VSP F400, F600, F800 and the newest F1500. Late last year, it also brought in 14 TB flash modules. This doubled the amount of raw storage capacity. At the same time, it dropped the Hitachi Flash Storage (HFS) A-series line. According to Gartner, HDS has high satisfaction, support and quality ratings. The VSP line comes with array software included. But its advanced software package, including Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID) application-aware copy management, is sold at a premium. Standard features include block and file protocols, file deduplication and storage virtualization. “Unlike most storage vendors that need a storage gateway, the HDS VSP F series natively integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Microsoft Azure and private cloud solutions on Hitachi Content Platform, and enables automatic migration of file data to these platforms,” said Filks. Kaminario The Kaminario K2 Gen6 is a scale-up and scale-out all-flash storage system that is said to support flexibility, performance and cost efficiency. Performance scales to over 1.5 million IOPS and more than 25 GB/sec throughput at low latency. The K2 has adaptive block size technology that enables support for mixed workload environments (such as analytics and transactional processing running at the same time). It also supports 87.5 percent utilization RAID and has inline global and selective deduplication, as well as inline byte-aligned compression. It is run by the Kaminario VisionOS distributed storage software stack. This includes enterprise data services for tier 1 storage, such as replication, snapshots, management and non-disruptive operations. Kaminario recently announced Kaminario K2.N and Flex. K2.N is based on VisionOS with an NVMeF backend and optional front end. This makes it possible to disaggregate capacity and compute to allow more flexibility in how storage is provisioned. Kaminario Flex is a storage management and orchestration layer managing K2.N resource pools to compose virtual private arrays. It is driven by the Kaminario analytics platform Clarity. K2.N and Flex will be available in the first and second half of 2018 respectively. Kaminario believes that the next-generation storage paradigm will be ruled by having the right software storage stack to meet the needs of next-generation applications. That means supporting extreme flexibility and performance at scale while maintaining cost efficiency and delivering a full set of data services. Any such platform must continually adopt the latest hardware and deliver it in a seamless integrated way to the customers. It touts its VisionOS as a way to achieve this. “Kaminario is focused on the SaaS, online, business and private cloud market,” said CTO Eyal David. “These customers have the need for the scalability, performance and agility that our platform provides.” Gartner classified Kaminario as a Leader. It gave the company credit for adding an NVMe/PCIe-connected compression offload engine, which is ready for more NVMe and NVMe fabric features as they are developed. In particular, Gartner noted that Kaminario has technological NVMe leadership and execution. Tegile Gartner classifies Tegile as a Visionary in the bottom right quadrant. It earned that label due to the fact that many of the guarantees, purchase options, features and programs that Tegile offers cannot be matched by competitors. “The interoperability, flexibility of options and features of the Tegile arrays are probably the most extensive in the market,” said Filks. “The arrays offer unified protocol support, very detailed instrumentation and configuration flexibility.” The Tegile IntelliFlash HD is aimed at medium and large enterprises. It is said to deliver up to five million IOPS and 10 PB of effective capacity in a rack. It can be used to consolidate mixed workloads into a single platform. Additionally, the company just updated its all-flash product line for the NVMe market, Gartner expects to be worth more than $50 billion by 2020 due to the demand for speed and performance. The Tegile N Series all-flash storage arrays incorporate solid state media with NVMe technology (24 HGST Ultrastar NVMe SSDs in a 2U footprint). This can offer up to 3 million IOPS with consistent 200 microsecond latency. “With the introduction of NVMe to the market, the next major battle in the enterprise storage market will be fought in the realm of persistent memory storage,” said Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO of Tegile. Tintri Tintri didn’t make it into the Leaders quadrant, but it did meet it into the Visionaries section. Filks noted that Tintri’s focus is on server-virtualized environments. With a new IPO behind it, Tintri is expanding. On the product front, it has announced plans for a product refresh and larger arrays later in the year. Currently, there are three T5000 series models available: T5040, T5060 and T5080. They scale from 6 TB at the low end to 92 TB of raw capacity at the top. Expect those numbers to shift significantly when the new models come out. The company claims up to 30:1 data reduction numbers. The Tintri SSAs also have hypervisor integration, simple administration and provisioning, as well as deep integration with VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and OpenStack. On the downside, there is no support for block storage or physical hosts. Fujitsu Gartner classes Fujitsu as a Challenger when it comes to all-flash storage. The Fujitsu ETERNUS AF storage product line is said to be affordable and easily configurable. It has an automated quality of service feature to ensure each application gets the performance it needs. Deduplication and compression are included, as well as disaster recovery (DR), mirroring and automated transparent failover. The ETERNUS AF line consists of two models: the entry-level ETERNUS AF 250 (>700 TB SSD capacity) and the midrange ETERNUS AF650 (up to 3 PB of SSD capacity). “The key differentiators of Fujitsu ETERNUS AF systems are response time, flexible deduplication and compression, automated quality of service management and transparent failover,” said Frank Reichart, head of storage marketing at Fujitsu. “If an ETERNUS AF system goes down, an ETERNUS AF or DX system can take over within five seconds at another location.” Gartner drew attention to the fact that the Eternus AF250 (with 737 TB of raw capacity) and Eternus AF650 (with 2.9 PB raw capacity) are backward compatible with earlier Fujitsu flash arrays, include good migration services from Fujitsu HDD arrays to SSAs, and have beneficial swap-out financial terms for Fujitsu-sold Violin Memory arrays.

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/top-10-all-flash-storage-vendors.html

Tintri - The Next Violin Memory In The Making

Summary Recent IPO stumbles right out of the gate by reporting disappointing quarterly results and issuing abysmal forward guidance. Management largely failed to address analysts' concerns on the call. High cash burn in combination with a rather weak balance sheet already puts the company at risk of going bankrupt in the not too distant future. Management should put the company up for sale or raise additional funds as soon as possible. Investors should move to the sidelines or even consider an outright short position. Frankly speaking, #Tintri 's (NASDAQ: #TNTR ) short life as a public company hasn't exactly been a success story, to say the very least. The small provider of all-flash storage solutions almost botched its IPO in June and only managed to list on Nasdaq after cutting the targeted IPO price by more than 40% (from an initial range of $10.50 to $12.50 to $7). In consequence, net proceeds came in at just $55.8 million relative to the originally targeted $100 million.  Picture: Tintri VMstore T800 Hybrid-Flash Array - Source: Company Website In fact, Tintri would have needed the additional funds badly as the company is not only burning cash at a rather breathtaking pace at more than $20 million per quarter but, unlike other tech IPOs, also carries a meaningful amount of debt on its balance sheet ($68.5 million at the end of Q2). Unfortunately, the bad news didn't stop here for Tintri. On August 22, the company disclosed the abrupt departure of its Chief Sales Officer in a filing with the SEC. The disclosure already caused one of the IPO's lead underwriters to downgrade the stock from "overweight" to "equal weight" and cut its price target from $10 to $6. After Tintri reported Q2 results on Thursday afternoon and guided for Q3, I fully expect basically all of the remaining analysts currently covering the company to follow suit over the next couple of days. While loss per share actually came in somewhat better than expected and top line revenues of $34.9 million missed consensus expectations just slightly, Q3 guidance, in fact, was much weaker than expected as Tintri now projects revenues to increase just slightly quarter over quarter to $36-37 million compared to analysts' expectations of $42.5 million. On the conference call, one analyst pointed to the guidance actually representing a meaningful year over year revenue decline for Q3. Not surprisingly, management was given a hard time by analysts on the call and, at least in my opinion, failed to come up with credible explanations for the company's struggles besides some turnover in the sales force. Frankly speaking, with larger peers #Nutanix (NASDAQ: #NTNX ) and #PureStorage (NYSE: #PSTG ) currently firing on all cylinders and hiring salespeople like crazy, I fully understand why Tintri is currently experiencing problems in its sales organization. Even worse, #Tintri is now looking to cut back on operating expenses, a highly unusual move for a company that is in urgent need to reinvigorate growth. The disclosure perplexed analysts on the call even more, particularly after management did not anticipate growth to re-accelerate meaningfully in Q4.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4105218-tintri-next-violin-memory-making

Tintri Extends its Enterprise Cloud Platform to Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud Object Storage

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--#Tintri, Inc. ( #NASDAQ: #TNTR), today announced the extension of its enterprise cloud platform to #AmazonWebServices and #IBM #CloudObjectStorage. Tintri Cloud Connector enables organizations to integrate their on-premises Tintri enterprise cloud infrastructure with #AWS and IBM cloud resources to create hybrid cloud services with building blocks from both #enterprisecloud and #publiccloud. “With Tintri, organizations can build enterprise cloud with autonomous operation, real-time and predictive analytics, automation, self-service, and tight connection to public cloud such as Amazon Web Services—benefiting from the best of both worlds” Tintri also announced updates to its platform that add predictive analytics for both compute and storage with a powerful machine learning engine, increase the scale of enterprise cloud up to 480,000 virtual machines and 40PB of primary storage, offer between 10X-30X acceleration of storage live migration, and extend support for cloud infrastructure-as-a-service with robust multitenant quota capabilities. Organizations use Tintri enterprise cloud platform as a foundation for their private clouds—to guarantee the performance of their applications, automate common IT tasks to reduce operating expenses, troubleshoot across compute, storage and network, predict their organization’s needs to scale and provide needed elasticity on demand. Tintri enterprise cloud already offers autonomous services, rapid elasticity or expansion, automation, and resource pooling—defined as key attributes of cloud according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Tintri Cloud Connector Tintri Cloud Connector tightly integrates enterprise cloud based on Tintri with AWS and IBM cloud resources, creating the foundation for hybrid cloud services. For example, customers can use AWS for the data protection, archive, and disaster recovery of their mission critical on-premises applications and restore applications and data in a single click to their Tintri Enterprise Cloud. Tintri Cloud Connector uses the Tintri CONNECT architecture which abstracts storage at the VM and container level for fastest recovery times and maximum flexibility. “ESG's preliminary analysis shows that organizations using Tintri's Enterprise Cloud solution with Tintri Cloud Connector can lower administrative costs by up to 72% compared to traditional LUN-based storage array with 3rd party or in-built cloud connector software,” said Aviv Kaufmann, Senior Economic Validation Analyst at ESG. “Tintri Cloud Connector accomplishes this by efficiently moving per-VM level data to and from AWS or IBM Cloud Object Storage with in-built compression, deduplication, and zero detection for virtualized and cloud workloads. With Tintri, Enterprises can lower cloud storage and data egress costs up to an estimated 80% and get up to a 4X lower RPO/RTO.” “We have worked closely with Tintri over the last several years and we share the common goal of providing customers with solutions aimed at delivering all the benefits the cloud offers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales & Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN). “We’re pleased that our joint customers can take advantage of Tintri Enterprise Cloud for their on-premises applications while at the same time rely on AWS for the protection, archive and recovery of these applications.” Compute Analytics Tintri Analytics, powered by Apache Spark, Elasticsearch and machine learning algorithms, uses the real-time VM and container-level data points that Tintri collects natively to enable powerful predictive analytics and planning capabilities. The analytics engine collects and analyzes up to three years of historical data from up to millions of VMs, and applies algorithms to predict resource needs up to 18 months into the future. With this new release, Tintri Analytics adds compute analytics to its existing storage predictive analytics planning capabilities which provide end-to-end view of infrastructure. Tintri Analytics will provide compute trending based on historical data, and will help users predict how much storage and compute they need based on current growth trends and what-if simulations of new projects. Enterprise Cloud Scale and Agility Tintri supports up to 64 Tintri storage systems under a single pane of glass with its Tintri Global Center management product. Customers can scale their enterprise cloud from 17 TB up to 40 PB of Tintri storage and manage up to 480,000 virtual machines or containers in a single management console. Tintri multitenancy support now includes hard quotas for logical capacity for multiple tenants in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment, including tenant separation, data encryption, service assurance and per-VM analytics for chargeback. Tintri VM Scale-out software allows customers to create and manage loosely coupled pools of storage for their virtualized and cloud applications. Built-in machine learning algorithms provide automated QoS and are designed to ensure that every application performs as desired. With this release, VM Scale-out adds array offloading of storage live migration for both vSphere and Hyper-V. Migrating running applications between Tintri storage arrays is up to 10X-30X faster than with other platforms, reducing the largest migrations from hours to minutes, eliminating load on compute hosts, and saving up to 95% or more of the bandwidth required to migrate applications between arrays. “With these announcements, Tintri provides a leap forward in enterprise cloud scale, agility, and end-to-end predictive capabilities and enables customers to unify their enterprise cloud and public cloud resources,” said Kieran Harty, Tintri’s CTO and co-founder. “With Tintri, organizations can build enterprise cloud with autonomous operation, real-time and predictive analytics, automation, self-service, and tight connection to public cloud such as Amazon Web Services—benefiting from the best of both worlds”. “What has always made Tintri unique is the way they do everything at the VM and container-level, which provides the right level of abstraction that is so central to cloud,” said Charles Ferland, System Administrator at La Capitale. “Whether it’s backing up data on premise or to public cloud, getting predictive insights, or creating automated policy-based QoS, the VM-level operation just makes everything so much easier and more efficient. Many people think it’s hard to get the benefits of public cloud in their own data center. We have basically done that with Tintri enterprise cloud.” Availability Tintri Analytics with Compute Analytics, Tintri Storage File System 4.4, and Tintri Global Center 3.6 will be available in Q3 of Tintri’s 2018 fiscal year to new Tintri customers and existing Tintri customers with a current Tintri support contract. Tintri VM Scale-out software with array offloading will be available in Q3 of Tintri’s 2018 fiscal year to new customers and existing customers licensed for the Tintri Software Suite or Tintri Global Center Advanced with a current Tintri support contract. Tintri Cloud Connector will be available in Q3 of Tintri’s 2018 fiscal year as part of Tintri Software Suite or as an a-la-carte software offering.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170816005544/en/Tintri-Extends-Enterprise-Cloud-Platform-Amazon-Web

Nutanix Revisited: An In-Depth Look Into Why This Private Cloud Leader Is Ripe For Comeback

Aug. 14, 2017 7:21 AM • NTNX Summary Ever since popping more than 2x in its September 2016 IPO, Nutanix shares have fallen by the wayside, as investors seem to ignore its massive growth and market-leading position. Right now, Nutanix is being comped against commodity storage providers with little IP, bearing a low valuation that doesn't give it credit for its extremely differentiated hyperconverged software. Contrary to popular belief, Nutanix is well-guarded from cannibalization from cloud vendors, as its private cloud approach makes the Nutanix platform marketable to a different set of customers. Nutanix has ample room for long-term growth as a distinguished leader in a greenfield market with few viable alternatives. The stock offers beaten-down value in an otherwise expensive market with crowded tech trades. #Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) is a puzzle for most investors, both from a technical and investment perspective. It's not exactly a low-margin hardware company that manufactures boring chips and peripherals, but neither is it a recurring revenue software company with monthly #SaaS billings. Its valuation and trading multiples seem to reflect the prevailing narrative of the day - immediately after its IPO, as investors bid shares up to the mid-$40s, the market saw it as a revolutionary software product with enviable growth. Then, the shares crashed below $20, as investors increasingly began to focus on the commodity hardware component and its position in a decidedly unattractive segment of IT, storage. Indeed the market has not been receptive to storage technology plays, punishing #Tintri (NASDAQ:TNTR) and having long forgotten about its older cousins #Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) and #NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP). But #Nutanix is not just any #flashstorage vendor like the rest, selling legacy solutions to cram more data into inefficient datacenters. Nutanix was the first company to commercialize the idea of #hyperconvergedinfrastructure (a technique long used internally by #Google (NASDAQ: #GOOG) (NASDAQ: #GOOGL) and #Facebook (NASDAQ: #FB ) to manage big #datasets internally), which applies highly advanced software running on cheap commodity hardware to turn standard datacenters into lean, modern workhorses capable of handling the immense challenges posed by #BigData and the associated spikes in IT workloads. Nutanix's thought leadership in revolutionizing the datacenter - through software, not hardware - has won it the love of customers as well as monstrous revenue growth, up nearly 2x in the last fiscal year. The company is on pace to reach $750mm in revenues this year (it reports Q4/FY17 results on August 30), and is likely on track to reach >$1bn in revenues next year, a staggering scale for a company whose market cap is still a polite $3.3bn. Nutanix is king of the so-called "private cloud", addressing a large (~$100bn) market currently littered with ancient legacy technology. With less than 1% of this market's current spend, Nutanix is just getting started. IT leaders are increasingly under pressure to upgrade their systems to whatever is new and exciting, as IT increasingly becomes a C-suite agenda item and a magnet for headlines. #Nutanix is the undisputed "cool kid" in a stagnant arena of decidedly unsexy names: #Dell, #HP (NYSE: #HPE ), #Cisco (NASDAQ: #CSCO ), #EMC, #VMware (NYSE: #VMW ), and the like. Nor is Nutanix subject to direct competition from #publiccloud vendors such as #Amazon (NASDAQ: #AMZN ) #AWS or #Microsoft (NASDAQ: #MSFT) #Azure. Public cloud serves a different set of use cases (namely, noncore workloads and adjunct applications involving minimal critical or private data), and large enterprises desiring security and control turn to Nutanix's private cloud solution to re-jigger the bulk of their datacenters. A large part of the valuation error in Nutanix's decline is due to the mistaken belief that Nutanix is a non-cloud (and therefore, non-growth) vendor - a few more quarters of outperformance should show investors that this is not the case.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4098579-nutanix-revisited-depth-look-private-cloud-leader-ripe-comeback

Tintri Cuts IPO Price In Latest S-1

Storage technology developer #Tintri made a cut in its expected IPO share price. Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri had been widely expected to go public on Thursday but instead filed an S-1 document detailing a price cut. A Tintri spokesperson told CRN that the company could not comment on what happened to its IPO beyond what was stated in the company's latest S-1.  Tintri's S-1 filing said it plans to offer 8.5 million shares of common stock with an anticipated initial public offering price of between $7.00 and $8.00 per share, raising $59.5 million to $68 million. Earlier, the company's expected offer was 8.7 million shares at between $10.50 and $12.50 per share. That would have raised $91.4 million to $108.8 million. [Related: IPO-Bound Tintri's S-1 Shows A Fast-Growing Channel Company That's Looking To Pare Down Its Losses] Other storage tech companies that have gone public in the past few years are seeing their shares trade close to their IPO price. #Hyperconverged infrastructure developer #Nutanix in late September went public with an initial price of $16 per share, which climbed as high as nearly $47 but is now back in the $19 range. #Allflash storage vendor #PureStorage in October 2015 also hit the public markets at $16 a share and now sits at under $13 per share. Both Pure Storage and Nutanix have market caps north of $2.5 billion. #Nimble Storage had its IPO in mid-December 2013 with an opening price of $21 per share and a first-day close of nearly $34 per share. Share prices peaked in February 2014 at almost $53 per share before sliding to the $7 to $9 per share range for all of 2016. #HPE acquired Nimble Storage early this year for $12.50 per share. Also, the IPO plans of at least one hot storage startup, hyper-converged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity, were squashed when Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquired it. The delay in Tintri's IPO and the fall in its IPO price lead to several questions about a company whose technology is actually quite innovative, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and Tintri channel partner. "I wonder if someone is going to pick Tintri up," Woodall told CRN. "Tintri has some really good intellectual property. It's not a question of there being no value here." Woodall said Tintri is strong in its granular management of storage, particularly with its granular insight into virtual machine storage, in a way few vendors are. "Tintri has a very good niche around virtualized management," he said. "In an area where simplicity is getting more important, Tintri stands out." However, lowering its IPO price instead of just pushing its IPO to a later date raises a red flag, Woodall said. "It doesn't leave me with a good feeling as to what the outcome will be," he said. "We'll have to wait and see what happens."

http://m.crn.com/news/storage/300088061/tintri-cuts-ipo-price-in-latest-s-1.htm

4 Reasons Tintri's IPO Will Singe Your Portfolio

It's been five years since I interviewed the founder of flash-storage maker #Tintri. While he left its CEO slot in 2013, the thing about the interview that stuck in my mind is that Tintri is the Gaelic word for lightning. If my 2012 interview revealed Tintri's brilliance, the over five year gap between that flash of lightning and its muted upcoming IPO reveals an important story -- it is a bad idea for venture investors to think that they can profit from funding storage companies that price their products below costs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2017/06/23/4-reasons-tintris-ipo-will-singe-your-portfolio/?c=0&s=StockWatch

Tintri Files for IPO as Flash-Based Cloud Storage Market Surges

Cloud storage provider #Tintri filed plans for an initial public offering that is expected to raise $100 million. The filing comes on the heels of the company posting a $105.3 million loss during its latest fiscal year. The Mountain View, California-based company earlier this month filed its IPO intent with the Securities and Exchange Commission. There has been no date or price range set for the IPO.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/tintri-files-for-ipo-as-flash-based-cloud-storage-market-surges/2017/06/

Tintri snaffles NetApp ONTAP engineering veep

Tintri siren's song helps old order give way to new

Execs come and execs go but some moves seem to illustrate the zeitgeist – and this is one such move. Tony Chang has left his #NetApp #ONTAP engineering VP role to join Tintri as an executive veep, not as a senior VP but an exec VP for #Tintri ’s engineering of its VM-aware systems

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/tintri_snaffles_netapp_ontap_engineering_veep/

NaaS guys finish ... first: Dell, HP, Mirantis, Tintri in OpenStack brat pack

The Tokyo #OpenStack summit saw more announcements today as vendors enjoy playing the Open Stack game which, it appears, no one can lose.

#Dell, #Mirantis and #BigSwitch Networks have launched an OpenStack Neutron networking reference architecture using a Big Cloud P+V #SDN Fabric, Dell Open Networking switches and Mirantis OpenStack. This was tested on an 8-rack, 300 compute-node OpenStack data centre Pod at the #DellOpenNetworking centre of excellence in Santa Clara, CA. and claimed to be deployed in just two hours.

#Neutron is said to provide networking-as-a-service (#NaaS) with a modular and plug-in architecture and APIs. Big Switch Networks says its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is built as a leaf, spine and virtual switch fabric. The #BigCloudFabric Controller acts as the centralised facility for provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics of the physical and virtual network environment.

Hybrid array vendor #Tintri stepped up and said it supports OpenStack. It has a Cinder driver that lets users analyse individual Cinder virtual machines and volumes from the Tintri user interface.

Tintri says it has #RedHat Enterprise #Linux OpenStack Platform Ecosystem certification and is a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/28/the_neutron_star_at_openstack_in_tokyo/