During the week of April 11, 2016, three notable enterprise system-related announcements were made by three storage device companies. Micron held an analyst day at its recently opened Storage Solutions Center in Austin, Texas, while HGST unveiled a new addition to its active archive line up. SanDisk, in a separate release, announced an upgrade to its all flash array system. All three companies, providers of storage devices, made clear that the market landscape is evolving markedly away from traditional storage and server solutions into one where commodity hardware, combined with software can improve scalability and lower costs when compared to traditional systems. While a large percentage of customers will continue to rely on traditional OEM server and storage systems well into the future, over time, growth will shift to those companies that own the key devices and can develop innovative system solutions, or to large companies that have the resources to develop custom commodity hardware and software.
SanDisk, Micron and HGST, as well as other device companies, will continue to push forward in an “up the stack” fashion to address changing market dynamics that provide opportunities previously available only to traditional system OEMs. While not the first, and definitely not the last, these recent announcements confirm an emerging era of new solutions that break traditional architectures. Through the employment of key software and partnerships, device makers will be able to proactively innovate devices beyond traditional designs.