Clouds and flash may sound like the description for a sudden summer thunderstorm, but they actually represent the two most disruptive forces in the enterprise storage business over the past 15 years.

The cloud platform, led by the introduction of Simple Storage Service, or S3, from Amazon Web Services Inc. in 2006, put object storage on the map and built a multibillion-dollar business for AWS. Flash storage delivered greater density in a smaller footprint at a faster speed, taking major business away from the hard disk drive industry.

Elastic Block Store, or EBS, represented another key advancement, providing AWS with a block and object storage portfolio that has made the company larger than every traditional storage player, except for Dell Technologies Inc.

The cloud provider will hold its third annual and free-to-attend AWS Storage Day on Sept. 2 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. PDT. The live event will include exclusive insights and announcements from leaders across AWS Storage. TheCUBE’s coverage of AWS Storage Day will include interviews with AWS’ Wayne Duso, vice president of engineering and Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of Block and Object Storage. (* Disclosure below.)

Revenue growth and innovation

As it closes in on $10 billion in storage revenue, Amazon’s impact on the industry is hard to overstate. The company continues to innovate in storage at the expense of on-premises storage vendors.

In December, AWS made a number of announcements designed to expand its enterprise storage capabilities. These included EBS io2 Block Express Volumes, billed as the first storage area network for the cloud, and EBS gp3 Volumes, designed to improve scaling of IOPS and throughput without needing to provision additional storage. AWS also made enhancements to S3 through tiering for automatic data archiving and multi-destination replication.

A key part of the company’s storage strategy is to simplify the migration of mission-critical workloads and databases to the cloud. This means offering an easier alternative to more complicated on-prem storage area networks.

“Every public cloud provider today has some combination of block, file and object storage services,” Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Steve McDowell, said in an interview with theCUBE. 

Nearly every workload relies on these storage services being present, and in those services delivering the performance and scalability that meets the needs of the application, McDowell added. “For the cloud market to grow, cloud storage needs to be as good as what can be built in a datacenter using traditional storage arrays. Amazon understands that better than most of its competitors.”

Acquisitions play a role

AWS has also built its competitive edge in storage through acquisition. In 2019 the company purchased Israeli startup E8 Storage, a company that specialized in hardware using flash storage. However, the key acquisition that AWS made to propel its storage initiative occurred in 2015 when the cloud giant bought Annapurna Labs for a reported $350 million.

At the time, Annapurna was an Israeli startup still in stealth mode. Not much was known about the company other than that it designed networking chips to improve datacenter efficiency. As it turned out, Annapurna’s technology led to the birth of Amazon’s EC2 C4 instance family and created storage accelerators linked to the E8 acquisition four years later.

“AWS doesn’t tell us how it’s out-innovating the competition in storage, but some things we know,” McDowell noted. “We know, for example, that Amazon’s Annapurna Labs builds custom storage accelerators based on technology from a company Amazon acquired back in 2019, E8. This offloads storage and network processing from the CPU, enabling the kinds of performance numbers that let AWS storage separate from the pack.”

Linkage with Outposts

AWS has also strengthened its storage portfolio by building on previously introduced products. The company launched AWS Storage Gateway at the start of 2012 to connect on-prem software appliances with cloud-based storage. This served as a forerunner to Amazon Outposts, the cornerstone of Amazon’s hybrid cloud solution, which became generally available at the end of 2019.

More recently, Pure Storage Inc.’s FlashBlade solution attained validated integration with Outposts deployments last fall, opening up new service lanes between the public cloud and the datacenter.

“Looking beyond just storage services, Amazon’s AWS Storage Gateway facilitates hybrid-cloud integration, its Local Zones and AWS Outposts offerings solve the latency problem for latency-sensitive workloads, and it’s rolling out interesting data management solutions for edge computing,” McDowell said. “This list goes on and on.”

Livestream of AWS Storage Day

AWS Storage Day is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here on demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of AWS Storage Day, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during AWS Storage Day include AWS’ Wayne Duso, vice president of engineering; Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of Block and Object Storage; Ed Naim, general manager of Amazon FSx; Nancy Wang, general manager of AWS Backup and data protection services; and Duncan Lennox, general manager of Amazon Elastic File System.

Stay tuned for a complete list of speakers.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Storage Day. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE Media