Tim Stammers is a Senior Research Analyst at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, where he covers primary and hyperconverged storage, emerging solid-state memories and related technologies. Before joining 451 Research in 2013, Tim was Senior Storage Analyst at Ovum. He has over 20 years of experience as an IT industry analyst and journalist, and has also worked as a gas turbine development engineer at Rolls-Royce, and a mainframe systems engineer at the London Electricity Board. Tim has been quoted by media organizations including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Le Figaro, the BBC and multiple specialist IT titles. He is a regular speaker at 451 Research events and in client webinars, and is a judge for the annual Flash Memory Summit awards. Tim holds a BSc Hons in Mechanical Engineering from City University, London and an MSc in Applied Computing from Middlesex University.
The emerging field of computational storage has attracted attention as a way to accelerate machine learning and other data-intensive applications in datacenters and edge locations. Startup NGD is one of the companies pioneering the technology, and says it is beginning to see large deployments of its products.
Intel and Micron’s jointly developed 3D XPoint or Optane media is the only viable mainstream storage-class memory on the market today. Hailed as a technical breakthrough when it was unveiled in 2015, it has so far met with an indifferent market response. But this situation looks set to change as both hardware and software developments are finally unlocking the potential benefits of the storage-class memory.
The pandemic bolstered the shift toward cloud computing in 2020. But it did little to improve exits for companies that sell the software for managing, monitoring and operating cloud and other IT environments. Spending on acquisitions of infrastructure management vendors dropped to its lowest annual total in more than a decade. Still, there's reason to anticipate higher spending in 2021.
Storage-class memory has been an IT holy grail for many years, but even though Intel's Optane memory has been shipping for almost four years as the only SCM on the market with potential for mainstream usage, its sales have been limited. Recent developments suggest that Optane take-up may have reached an inflection point.
The company has widened the options for its on-premises services and has become the first major vendor to publicly declare the opex-style prices for the offerings. Pure says that per TB of stored data, the services can be as much as 20% cheaper than capex-style hardware purchases. Will its rivals follow suit with public price lists?
The year ahead will see an acceleration of digital transformation initiatives that support business outcomes of agility, resilience and cost containment. The transition to hybrid, multicloud IT infrastructures supported by cloud-native application development tools and practices will only accelerate, as we will still have to operate under pandemic conditions for a minimum of several months into 2021.
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