2015 – Year-in-Review, from an enterprise storage standpoint

As always, another year is just coming to its end as if it was just a few hours. It was another awesome, eventful year for one in the world of technology and especially our small world – storage and virtualization. New products, acquisitions and startups and more… 2015 has put many hooks – of excitement – in place for 2016. There are many of course (lot more for a single blog post), but I am trying to highlight some of the important ones I noted here in this post.

2015

Acquisitions

There were many acquisitions this year in the storage and virtualization industry, some of them which (I have noted, and) I felt important…

Dell-EMCOne of the most talked subject in 2015, one of the biggest IT transaction in 2015. Dell got in agreement with EMC of $67 Billion, that’s really huge and was really unexpected due to many reasons (Dell’s press release, EMC Future Ready ) . The 60 day ‘go-shop’ period has been completed on 12-Dec and now Dell is expected to complete the transaction in the middle of next year (Anytime between May and October -2016).

It will be quite interesting to see how this merger impact the market in many aspects including the future of the products from both these vendors (EMC VNX,VMAX etc.. and Dell Compellent etc…), the future of VCE, +/- ves for the employees (benefits, layoffs etc… if any), reaction from the competitors and more. Lot more news to come in this regard in 2016.

NetApp-SolidFire : I got to know about the NetApp-SolidFire news while I was in the middle of this post. This $870 million deal is another storage-storage deal in 2015 after the giant Dell-EMC deal. NetApp in their press release on 21-Dec, announced they are in agreement to acquire the 2010 founded All-Flash-Array vendor. It will be quite interesting to see how NetApp will be improvising their AFA portfolio and how they will be handling the challenges in integration.

Western Digital – SanDiskWDC announced their deal of $19 billion to acquire SanDisk on 21-October. This was another surprise deal by the Hard disk manufacturer to get one of the leaders in Flash memory manufacturing. This move towards the flash memory market is underlining the same statement, ‘future is flash’. With this effort for NAND integration, WDC is aiming to double the market addressability.

IBM-Cleversafe : on 6-Nov, in their official press release IBM announced they have completed their acquisition of Cleversafe. Financial terms of the deal was not disclosed. Cleversafe was founded in 2004 and was known for their contributions in the development and management of object-based storage software and appliances. With this new addition – the added capability in storage and hybrid cloud – we can expect more from IBM’s cloud portfolio in near future.

Other highlights : EMC announced their plan to acquire Virtustream in May, strengthening EMC’s cloud service business. Storage virtualization software company Sanbolic was acquired by Citrix in 2015 for an undisclosed price. A $3 billion deal by HP to acquire Aruba Networks was another hot news in 2015.

Product launches and Startups

2015 given rise to many new storage startup companies including ClearSky Data, Cohesity, Infinidat, Hedvig, Springpath etc… The great technology and innovative way of implementations made most of them favorites to the market already. CRN listed the top 10 coolest storage startups here in this post.

There were many new product/technology launches this year. A few among them include HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 series, Purestorage FlashArray//m, Tintri’s entry to the AFA market, Oracle FS1 Flash array, Nutanix Acropolis and Prism, VCE VxRack, etc…

2015, for me

For me, 2015 was a great year in my professional career. New Job, new location, and new challenges … I really enjoyed the year passing by and it gave me a great opportunity to meet and work with many wonderful people. I got recognized as EMC Elect, VMware vExpert and Cisco Champion this year – second year in a row..!

One of the best part in 2015 was the tech-events I was able to be part of. I was invited for the Tech Field Day events (SFD7 in March and SFD8 in October) this year. These were great opportunities to meet some of the industry’s leading contributors, to hear from industry leaders and to learn about new products and technologies.

Hoping you all my readers had a great time in 2015 and hope you all will have another fantastic year ahead.

Wish you all a Happy New Year 2016…!

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