Does StorCentric in Chapter 11 signal a contraction for the storage industry?

Chris Mellor at Blocks and Files has a new article covering the StorCentric Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, which could result in the company going under, or being sold off cheaply. It’s always sad to see the demise of a business, particularly for the employees involved, who will have worked hard to keep their company afloat. However, in this instance I’m far from surprised that StorCentric has failed to make headway in the market.

Background

StorCentric has a collection of previously failed storage solutions with no clear message or strategy on how the previous failings would be addressed or mitigated as part of the StorCentric brand. I’ve covered most of the portfolio over the years and even owned some of them.

Drobo

Drobo was a great innovation ten years ago but had reliability problems and some fundamental design flaws. As a SOHO storage platform, the technology looked cool and had some simple operational aspects, like easily replaceable HDDs. Where the technology failed was the reliability of the software, which frequently flagged drives as falsely failing or would simply not connect to the management tools.

Storage Field Day 7 – Initial Thoughts

The RAID implementation was novel – drives could be different sizes, which helped upgrade in place. However, there was no way to implement a controlled RAID rebuild, so swapping drives meant taking a risk that no other drive had a failure during the replacement process.

Violin

Violin Systems, which emerged from the bankruptcy of Violin Memory, was always a non-starter. The market had moved on and good enough all-flash systems from the major vendors could placate existing customers. Only Pure Storage and IBM (to my knowledge) now bother to manufacture custom SSDs (Hitachi used to, but I think they’ve abandoned that technology). The build or buy decision is one that most storage systems vendors have avoided by simply using off the shelf components, as, in most cases, commodity parts are good enough.

Violin is left with no differentiating features in a very competitive market.

Vexata

Vexata was an interesting design, but perhaps too early for the market for super-high performance in the way that DSSD from EMC was a great concept but way too early for most enterprises. The Vexata solution was designed to exploit the benefits of emerging NVMe-oF, but as with most technologies, this protocol has taken longer to be adopted by the enterprise than expected.

Vexata Announces VX-Cloud

Perhaps only Nexsan has had the longevity and success out of all the StorCentric portfolio, but this is essentially an SMB product, rather than large enterprise-capable.

The Architect’s View®

What happens next? I don’t see a market for any of these products. All of them have been superseded by newer and better designs. There may be residual value in the IP, but not much else. Storage companies are having to address the challenge of the public cloud, including adapting financial business models to offer consumption-based purchasing. StorCentric can’t adapt to this requirement, as the company can’t finance the build and sale of traditional products. Funding an “as-a-service” model would be impossible in the current climate.

In some respects I’m surprised the storage market has supported so many diverse storage solutions for such a long time. This position is only possible when the diversity of products meets some specific set of customer requirements. In the modern storage industry, differentiation is more about business models than features and functionality. As a result, the products (and companies) that will survive will need to demonstrate fiscal efficiency as the lead characteristic, while continuing to evolve technologically. This isn’t where the StorCentric portfolio resides today. As a result, getting out of Chapter 11 could be a hard slog.