I’ve been deep in the storage and cloud world for the past year tracking some of the hottest trends with market leaders like EMC, Fusionio, Compellent, Falconstor, HP, IBM, and others. One thing is clear: storage is sexy and hot.

Some recent news got my attention and prompted me to write about some of the trends that I’m seeing in storage.  Yesterday, ZDnet reported that some of the tech giants are forming a SSD (solid state device) working group to bolster enterprise adoption.  Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel have formed a working group to create better form factors and faster connections for solid-state drives.

The goal of the new charter of the group is to leverage older standards and add in  Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, or PCIe, which is a computer expansion card standard for PCs.  The proposed standards meet the current constraints of using SSD as a disk – ie high path overhead.  PCIe needs multi-CPU access to avoid having to have clustering solutions for failover solutions.  There is a big benefit of having low power high-speed persistent storage devices near the CPU.

The market is looking at new storage paradigms such as storage near CPU, storage on SAN, storage in cloud – all under common management system.  We will see if this new group can address what the market is looking for.

Other Trends

Today Fusion-io is expanding their technology alliance program to bring their technology to the enterprise.  Fusion-io will develop new Fusion Powered technologies, including flash-optimized software, a new generation of storage appliances and virtualization solutions.

Fusion-io is one of the hottest companies in storage.  Fusion-io has been quietly running the table on key OEM deals to have their technology embedded in all the top storage hardware in the world.  Fusion-io is quickly becoming the “Intel of storage” when it comes to SSD and performance and scale improvement.  I’ve been following Fusion-io since VMworld, where we heard about how amazing their technology really is.  Even Steve Wozniak is an employee.   Here is a video that SiliconANGLE.tv had with the CEO of Fusion-io David Flynn at VMworld 2010 in SF.

Compellent – another company that we covered at VMworld, is also very hot right now.  Compellent announced their Q3 results, which showed them hitting record revenues as third quarter sales reached $42.1 million.  They continue to grow their customer base and added 179 new customers in Q3 for a new total of 2,303. That means the Compellent Fluid Data architecture continues to replace legacy storage a big issue for the existing players like NetApp. ( See video here).

Also Compellent must be getting buyout offers left and right, and it was reported that Compellent engaged Frank Quattrone’s company to represent them.  Not a bad idea since Frank’s team (George in particular over there) has been killing it in terms of deals and exits.  Acquisition speculation centered on Dell, which was the loser in this summer’s bidding war for Compellent competitor 3Par. Hewlett-Packard, which won that bidding war, eventually paid $2.35 billion for 3Par.

Compellent is looking like it might track the same way.  Good for them.  Phil Soren and their midwest team are nice guys and very smart.

My Angle on Storage Trends = Storage Drives Cloud and Mobile Value Propositions

All of these trends point to a bigger picture.  New levels of performance and capability are in high demand both from enterprises, mobile providers, and end user consumers.  This is driving new opportunities for new and existing companies.  This is why I find the Fusion-io and Compellent value proposition relevant.  Also, the big guys aren’t standing still.  EMC is focused big time on virtualization and are #1 in that market for storage.  HP and IBM are also focused on large scale performance.

IBM recently hit it out of the park with their focus on real time compression. IBM is ramping up their storage presence with a big focus on real time.  I think that IBM has it nailed in their real time compression strategy.  That will be a solid difference between them and other players. Here is a video of IBM at their recent analyst event that I attended in NYC.

HP has a unique advantage is that they have integration capability across servers and networking to give their storage a price advantage to compete with the new open source commodity storage players.  I had a chance to sit down with all the top execs at HP including David Donetelli in Barcelona earlier this month.  Here is a video of David Donatelli from Barcelona, where I attended their big global announcement.

Also, SiliconANGLE.tv broadcasted live with theCube at the Hitachi new production launch in San Jose (videos are here).  Hitachi has a strong positioning with their 3D scaling – scale up, scale across, and scale deep.  Hitachi is moving in a direction with a storage cloud focus with great products.  Hitachi introduced the notion of the content cloud.  Here is the video of their CEO talking to me about their vision and new products.

For emerging startups the common theme that I’m hearing from all the founding CEO and CTOs is new software functionality on low cost machines and storage devices.  This is forcing the big players to differentiate and provide faster, lower cost solutions at scale.  The new startups all are focused on solutions like Hadoop and MapReduce and other proprietary software.  Commodity machines and open source make the startup landscape for storage a breeding ground for new innovation.  Another angle is storage that works fast with mobile with low latency data retrieval for anyone, anytime, anywhere.   Here is a video from CEO of Cloudera Mike Olson who is leading the Hadoop movement sweeping the technology industry.

I predict a new pecking order will emerge in the storage and networking market.  New companies will emerge and some of the big established players will move higher.  With all of this, there will be some big players who don’t make it.

We’ll be tracking it all with our continuous coverage of the cloud collision on SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv