A war is waging in the storage industry and the skirmish is shaping up between large established players as well as upstarts. The new battleground is flash storage. Industry giant IBM made an acquisition to enter the business (Texas Memory Systems) while HP chose to develop internally on top of 3PAR.  EMC took the acquisition path after an attempt to enter the business organically, purchasing Israeli startup XtremIO. Another front of this war opened Thursday when EMC announced general availability of its XtremIO all-flash array. This should have been a fairly routine announcement. Flash arrays are not new. The first all-flash arrays were introduced more than two years ago by flash startups such as Pure Storage, Nimbus, Violin Memory and Whiptail (now part of Cisco). Both IBM and HP announced all-flash arrays actually in the same week in June 2013 in conferences (IBM Edge 2013 and HP Discover 2013) in nearby hotels in Las Vegas.

And technically EMC already had two all-flash arrays on the market. It announced more than a year ago that it would offer hybrid flash/disk versions of its VMAX and VNX storage arrays, with customers able to specify how much of each storage type they wanted. Customers could order 100% flash in either array.

Of course the XtremIO array is different from the other EMC arrays in that they were designed to co-exist with spinning disk while XtremIO was designed from ground up for flash. Still, according to competitors, compared to alternatives it is not a groundbreaking technology, and the announcement has been expected for months. Actually the question was why EMC had not released the array for general availability early this year. It had been selling XtremIO arrays to selected customers — the industry rumor was that customers who were important enough to EMC could get it if they specifically asked for it — for several months. According to Wikibon analyst Stuart Miniman, EMC made its XtremIO arrays available under a program called “Directed Availability,” a new process designed to control the flow of product to limit risk. Others observers have questioned whether Directed Availability is designed to avoid cannibalizing EMC’s flagship VMAX and VNX systems.

When EMC made the announcement both IBM and HP issued statements providing detailed criticisms of the new array, not a normal policy for either vendor. IBM in particular usually declines to compare its products directly to competitors or to comment on competitive products. HP’s comments, attributed to VP of Worldwide Storage Marketing Craig Nunes, were particularly detailed and in places and sometimes extremely pointed.

This clearly is a declaration of war. For a decade or more, both IBM and HP had emphasized server R&D over the storage business. In the last few years both companies seem to have realized that they have been leaving money on the table in failing to sell storage more aggressively, and both have begun making  moves in the market, initially by acquiring startups that pioneered new technologies. IBM, for instance, purchased XIV, while HP has acquired several interesting new technology companies and successfully integrated them into a completely renewed storage group; the most notable being 3PAR.

A New Generation Opportunity

Ironically, EMC started the flash wave by incorporating flash drives into its VMAX system. But upstart Fusion-io took the early lead by introducing server-side flash as essentially a persistent extension of memory. The EMC announcement and Fusion’s success spurred numerous investments, mainly by VC-backed startups and traditional vendors realized over time that this was a major opportunity. The market began to understand that flash would be crucial to a new generation of business computing including forward-looking big data analysis, mobile-cloud applications, database and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Like other next-generation technologies, it would drive accelerated replacement of older systems, in this case disk. These generational technology shifts often also see new vendors replace older dominant players, and if the startups could get a technological edge they could walk away with the lion’s share of this new market, de-positioning EMC in the as a legacy disk vendor in an increasingly flash-oriented storage market.

That is exactly why IBM, for instance, invested in flash storage development and put one of its most dynamic rising stars, Dr. Ambuj Goyal, in charge of worldwide storage. And it is why at IBM Edge 2013 last June, Goyal pushed flash over disk aggressively for almost all use cases, not just for high performance applications. Certainly his arguments were persuasive, but the fact is that IBM, HP and EMC must carefully navigate the transition from legacy spinning disk to flash. All three have large established spinning disk businesses and potentially much lose of the flash transition is botched.

The Cisco Wildcard

The wildcard here is Cisco. When it announced its intention to purchase flash array vendor Whiptail it said it wanted flash technology to add to its server line. But it already had that technology from EMC, its partner in VCE. And if that is what Cisco wants, then why did it buy Whiptail rather than one of the smaller server flash card makers?

My guess is that Cisco is sending a message, and that EMC received it. Cisco is furious about being outbid for software-defined networking pioneer Nicera by EMC-subsidiary and VCE partner VMware. Buying Whiptail sends a message to EMC that two can play this game. Soon after Cisco announced its acquisition plan mentions of XtremIO started appearing on EMC’s Web site, and now it has officially announced general availability. That may be coincidental, and XtremIO VP and General Manager Ehud Rokach says that the last 18 months have been spent integrating the XtremIO technology into EMC’s architectural structure and in testing, but it certainly looks like EMC is reacting to Cisco’s announcement. The strong reaction from IBM and HP may have been a surprise. Exactly what Cisco will do remains to be seen, but competitors claim with the addition of Whiptail it has all the components it needs to withdraw from VCE and field its own converged hardware system, leaving EMC high and dry.

Miniman, the Wikibon analyst disagrees. “In today’s IT market, partners compete, that’s just the way it is. As long as VCE is making money for the parent companies they’re not like to kill the cash cow. What’s more, Cisco needs the distribution channel for its UCS server line.”

EMC as the leader is under fire from its competitors. The company has seemed to always be able to re-invent itself but it needs to step up to the plate and hit a home run in flash storage to hold its dominant marketshare, and demonstrate that the XtremIO announcement is more than just a base hit. Today the storage market is EMC’s to lose, but if it slips its major competitors, along with some upstarts, will try to pick up the pieces.