The just-published Wikibon vSphere 5 adoption survey holds good news for EMC but a warning for VMware. Market interest in traditional storage vendors is waning, and while companies are not leaving their primary vendor, they are looking hard at innovative “hybrid” storage startups such as Nimble Storage and Tintri. That, says Wikibon CTO David Floyer, is a wakeup call that VMware needs to reach beyond the “EMC and the stale cartel of traditional vendors” to include these innovators when working on its new vision for storage virtualization.

Floyer’s latest Peer Incite, “Wikibon 2012 vSphere 5 Survey shows Customer Satisfaction and Rapid Adoption”,  reviews some of the central findings of the survey and focuses on the growing interest in hybrid vendors. He notes that 49% of the 158 respondents to the survey use EMC as their primary storage vendor, with NetApp second at 18%. Overall survey participants report high satisfaction with their primary storage vendor. However 10% of respondents rated either Nimble Storage or Trintri as “best” for storage in a virtualized environment. This equals Dell (10%) and is greater than HP (8%), Hitachi (3%), or IBM (2%).

The survey is informal and the number of those surveyed a small and not necessarily representative sampling of the total storage market. However, such a large following for startup, next-generation vendors may indicate the start of a significant change, Floyer suggests, and is something VMware should notice.

VMware, of course, is owned by EMC and now headed by new CEO and former top EMC exec Pat Gelsinger. The leadership at EMC has consistently promised that VMware will continue to run as an independent company. Its response to these leading edge storage vendors with technologies not yet part of EMC’s product set may be the acid test of these promises and could impact the market’s view of VMware long term.

SiliconAngle and Wikibon will webcast live  from the Cube at next week’s VMworld 2012 conference Monday, August 27 through Thursday, August 30. Top executives from VMware including Gelsinger, Co-President Tod Nielsen, and CTO Steve Herrod, and Trintri’s Kieran Harty and Nimble Storage’s Suresh Vasudelvan, are among the many industry leaders scheduled for live interviews. These and many other interviews will be shown live on www.siliconangle.tv and will be well worth watching.

Like all Wikibon community research, this Professional Alert is available in its entirety without charge on the Wikibon.org Web site. Interested IT professionals are invited to register on the Wikibon site, which allows them to read, correct, and comment on this and other Wikibon research as well as receive Wikibon’s Peer Incite announcements and newsletters.