企業存儲類初創公司走紅

Thirty years ago, before software began “eating the world,” much of the information in industry was stored on spinning disks—those relatively slow but inexpensive devices reminiscent of record players. A handful of manufacturers competed in that business. The business of relational databases—the software typically used to structure the data as they were stored—was largely dominated by Oracle.

30年前，也就是軟件還沒有“蠶食這個世界”的時候，大量的行業信息都被儲存在所謂的“旋轉式磁盤”之中。這種存儲速度相對較慢，但比較便宜的存儲設備，很容易讓人回憶起唱片機。在這個領域裏競爭的製造商也爲數不多。關係數據庫（也就是用來構建存儲數據的軟件）產業，當時基本上是甲骨文公司的天下。

Industry hummed along that way for many years. Then it all changed, quickly.

整個行業沿着這個方向發展了很多年，但很快一切都變了。

First, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs refused to continue using spinning drives in the company’s iPod portable music player, choosing instead lighter, more energy-efficient solid-state drives. Given the tremendous volumes of the iPod that were sold at the time, the decision helped drive a movement toward flash memory in consumer devices, says John Vrionis, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prices for flash began to fall dramatically. Large businesses and their data centers soon followed.

首先是蘋果已故CEO史蒂夫o喬布斯不願繼續在iPod便攜式音樂播放器中使用旋轉式磁盤，轉而使用質量更輕，也更節能的固態硬盤。光速創投合夥人約翰o弗里奧尼斯指出，由於當時iPod的銷量極大，這項決定推動了閃存在消費電子設備中的使用。閃存的價格也開始顯著下降。各大企業和他們的數據中心也很快跟上了這一潮流。

“Flash performs like memory, which is 100 times faster than spinning disks, but it’s almost as cheap as disk,” Vrionis says. “You get all the performance benefits of memory, but it costs almost the same as disk.”

弗里奧尼斯表示：“閃存的性能與內存相似，但它比旋轉式磁盤快100倍，而價格卻像硬盤一樣便宜。你可以既享受到內存的性能優勢，同時享受到幾乎像硬盤一樣低廉的價格。”

Another contributing factor was a gigantic leap in the amount of data that average users were accessing on a given day, supported by the rapid rise of the Internet-connected mobile device. On a consumer level, anyone with a smartphone can relate to the trend; for businesses, the volumes began to get so big as to fall into the territory now known as “big data.”

另外一個推動因素，則是普通用戶平均每天存取的數據量出現了巨大飛躍，而這主要歸功於聯網移動設備的快速興起。在消費者層面上，任何人只要有一部智能手機，都與這種趨勢相關。在企業界，數據量開始迅速增大，由此催生了一個現在被稱爲“大數據”的新興領域。

A final factor was the storage industry’s move to software-defined storage, a kind of storage technique that uses cheap, distributed hardware (rather than massive, centralized boxes) to scale with demand easily and inexpensively. “Just as you want to buy whatever PC you want and then choose the operating system separately, people want to buy hardware and then get the storage software separately,” Vrionis says.

最後一個因素是存儲行業開始轉向軟件定義存儲，這種存儲技術使用了廉價、分散的硬件（而不是集中的大型箱式機）實現了規模效益，可以輕易地並且低成本地滿足需求。弗里奧尼斯表示：“就像你可以買任何一臺你喜歡的電腦，然後再單獨選擇操作系統一樣，人們也想先買硬件，然後再單獨買存儲軟件。”

Put it all together, and what do you get? A storage market ripe for change and a boatload of startups vying to make it happen. “Huge tailwinds are giving all these startups a chance,” Vrionis says. “They’re unstoppable now.”

將所有這些趨勢聚集在一起，你能得到什麼結論？那就是存儲市場已經發展到變革的邊緣，很多創業公司爭相使之發生。弗里奧尼斯認爲：“一股巨大的推動力正在給予所有這些創業公司一個機會，他們現在幾乎是不可阻擋的。”

$1 billion per year

每年10億美元

Vrionis’s firm is just one of many that have been betting heavily on enterprise storage startups—including contenders such as DataStax and PernixData, which recently drew fresh funding of $106 million and $35 million, respectively. (Vrionis himself serves on DataStax’s board of directors.)

在企業存儲領域下了重注的風投還有很多，弗里奧尼斯的公司只是其中之一。在這個領域中競爭的創業公司有DataStax和PernixData等，這兩家公司最近剛剛分別拉到了1.06億美金和3500萬美元的投資。（弗里奧尼斯自己就是DataStax公司的董事會成員。）

A few other examples that have drawn investment attention in the past few months: Primary Data, which took in $10 million in Series B funding in February; Tintri, which garnered $75 million in Series E funding that same month; Pure Storage, which closed a $225 million Series F round in April; Nutanix, with a $140 million Series E in August; Amplidata, with a $10 million Series E round in September; Formation Data Systems, with a $24.2 million Series A that month; SolidFire, which closed an $82 million Series D round in October; SwiftStack, whose $16 million Series B round also took place that month; IzumoBase, which raised $1.4 million in November; Kaminario, whose $53 million Series E took place earlier this month; and DataGravity, which this month closed a $50 million Series C round.

除此之外，還有幾家公司在過去幾個月也吸引了大量投資。比如Primary Data公司在二月的B輪融資中融得1000萬美元；Tintri公司也於二月在E輪融資中募得7500萬美元；Pure Storage公司四月在F輪融資中籌得2.25億美元；Nutanix公司在八月份的E輪融資中籌得1.4億美元；Amplidata公司在九月份的E輪融資中籌得1000萬美元；Formation Data Systems公司也於同月在A輪融資中籌得2420萬美元；SolidFire公司在十月份的D輪融資中籌得8200萬美元；SwiftStack公司在同月的B輪融資中籌得1600萬美元；IzumoBase公司在11月融資140萬美元；Kaminario公司在本月初的E輪融資中籌得5300萬美元；DataGravity公司剛剛在本月的C輪融資中籌得5000萬美元。

In all, disclosed investment in enterprise-storage startups has amounted to about a billion dollars per year in each of the last few years, says Simon Robinson, a research vice president for storage and information management with 451 Research, which has been covering the space since 2000.

451 Research公司自從2000年起就開始關注企業存儲領域，該公司的存儲與信息管理研究副總裁西蒙o羅賓遜指出，總體來看，在過去幾年裏，向企業存儲類創業公司已披露的投資，基本上每年都能達到10億美元左右。

“You get these waves of startups,” Robinson says. “As soon as you think the industry is done with storage, along comes another wave. It’s been a constant cycle of innovation in the last decade.”

羅賓遜表示：“這類初創公司層出不窮，你剛覺得行業的這一波存儲潮結束了，馬上就會迎來另一波。過去十年，這個領域基本上一直都處於創新期。”

Typically, those waves of innovation have each focused on a particular feature, spawning numerous startups playing to a similar theme. “Some wouldn’t last; a couple would be acquired; one or two would do really well and go public,” Robinson says. “Then usually one of the big guys would step in and pay a substantial premium to acquire them.”

每一波的創新浪潮基本上都集中於某一特定功能，大量創業公司都在圍繞一個類似的主題。羅賓遜指出：“有些創業公司不會持久，有一些會被收購，有一兩家公司會做得非常出色，然後上市。然後某家大公司就會踏足進來，花高價收購它們。”

Data Domain, for instance, was acquired in 2009 by EMC EMC 1.00% , which snatched up Isilon the following year. Hewlett-Packard HPQ -0.25% bought 3PAR in 2010; Dell acquired Compellent Technologies in 2011. The list goes on.

比如Data Domain公司就於2009年被EMC公司收購，就在第二年，EMC又收購了一家名叫Isilon的創業公司。惠普（Hewlett-Packard）則於2010年買下了3PAR公司；戴爾（Dell）於2011年收購了Compellent Technologies公司。類似的收購還有很多。

“The thing to bear in mind is that you have five or six big vendors, virtually nobody in middle, and then a whole bunch of startups,” Robinson says. “We haven’t seen a major change in the cast of characters in the last decade.”

羅賓遜指出：“需要注意的是，這個領域大約有五六家大廠商，基本上沒有人在中游，然後就是一大堆創業公司。在過去10年裏，這張‘演員表’基本上沒怎麼大變。”

Dave Wright, SolidFire‘s founder and CEO, says his company grew 700% year over year in 2013 and 50% quarter over quarter this year. He attributes much of that to two “huge waves of change” affecting the industry.

SolidFire公司創始人兼CEO戴夫o萊特表示，他的公司2013年的年增率達到700%，而每個季度都比上一季度增長50%。他認爲，這主要歸功於影響行業的兩個“重大的變革浪潮”。

The shift to flash and solid-state storage is one of those. “That’s very disruptive—a huge chunk of the storage market is going to move to flash over the next few years,” he says. (SolidFire offers all-flash systems with a focus on scale-out storage for data centers.)

首先是向閃存和固態硬盤的轉變。他表示：“它非常有顛覆性，在未來幾年，存儲市場將有相當一部分向閃存轉型。”（SolidFire主要提供全閃存系統，同時重點提供數據中心的擴展存儲。）

At the same time, though, Wright downplays that trend as “a fairly short-term disruptive shift—everybody is doing that,” he says.

不過與此同時，萊特也看低這股趨勢，認爲它只是“一種較爲短期的顛覆式轉型——人人都在做它。”

More interesting from Wright’s perspective is a second major shift: the transition within enterprises from traditional, so-called siloed data infrastructures to cloud-based ones. It’s a change that is affecting the entire industry, but one that “a lot of other startups in the storage space are not really attuned to,” he says. ‘That’s what we think is going to make us more successful in the long term: SolidFire is the only infrastructure purpose-built for this wave of cloud.”

從萊特的觀點看，更有意思的則是第二個重大轉型，也就是企業從傳統的所謂孤立式數據架構向雲架構的轉變。這種轉變正在影響整個行業，但是“很多存儲類創業公司並沒有真正適應這種轉變。”他還表示：“這就是我們爲什麼認爲我們在長期會更加成功，因爲SolidFire是目前唯一專門爲雲計算浪潮構建的專用架構。”

‘Looking for simplicity’

尋找簡單性

Part of the challenge for storage startups today is to simplify what has become an inordinately complex and fragmented landscape, Robinson says. It’s the result of a lot of feature-focused research and development over the last decade.

羅賓遜認爲，如今存儲類創業公司面臨的挑戰之一，是要簡化過去那種非常複雜和碎片化的格局。它正是過去十年很多以功能爲重點的研發所造成的結果。

“Big companies have lots of storage systems, each of which serves a particular purpose,” he says. “The challenge that organizations are having now is not just the data growth, but managing that environment, which may consist of seven or eight storage silos with huge complexity.”

他表示：“大公司有很多存儲系統，其中每個系統都服務於一個特定的用途。企業所面臨的挑戰不僅僅是數據量的增長，還有如何管理這種環境，因爲這些系統可能包括了七八個獨立的存儲系統，極其複雜。”

Simplicity is a new goal, in other words. The trend has led to an industry preference for more all-encompassing approaches. “Converged” (which combines storage and compute in a single device) and “hyper-converged” (which combines storage, compute, networking, and virtualization in a single device) models reflect the shift. Robinson points to Nutanix and Formation Data Systems as notable contenders.

換句話說，簡單性是一個新的目標。這種趨勢使得整個行業開始青睞那些“萬金油”式的方案。所謂的“融合”模式（將存儲和計算整合到一臺設備上）和“高度融度”模式（將存儲、計算、網絡和虛擬化整合到同一臺設備上）的流行也反映了這種轉變。羅賓遜指出，Nutanix和Formation Data Systems公司是這方面的兩個值得注意的競爭者。

Meanwhile, the flood of apps—internal and customer-facing, and often mobile—continues unabated, increasing pressure on businesses to achieve better performance and speed from the databases and storage systems that underpin those applications.

與此同時，應用軟件的熱潮（包括內部應用、面向顧客的應用，往往還有移動應用）依然沒有減退，這也加大了企業的壓力，迫使它們不得不提高數據庫和存儲系統的性能和速度。

“Every second of latency can cost you 10 percent of conversions, and it’s getting worse on mobile, where the network has its own built-in latency,” says Matt Murphy, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (KPCB invested in both DataStax and PernixData; Murphy serves on PernixData’s board.) “If you can cut off a second or half a second, there’s millions or hundred of millions of dollars in opportunity there in play. At all layers—storage, compute, network—everyone is trying to figure out how to get that extra edge.”

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers公司（該公司是DataStax和PernixData公司的投資方，其合夥人墨菲也是PernixData的董事會成員）的合夥人馬特o墨菲指出：“每一秒鐘的延遲都可能讓你損失10%的客戶，在移動端則更嚴重，因爲移動網絡本來就有延遲。如果你可以把延遲減少一秒或半秒，就擁有了可能賺幾百萬甚至上億美元的機會。在存儲、計算和網絡等所有層面上，每家公司都在想方設法地獲得這種額外優勢。”

The question is which technologies and vendors will best deliver that edge. Lightspeed’sVrionis contends that newcomers to the scene have an advantage over incumbents, which are still “staring at yesterday’s problems and not able to take a blank sheet of canvas.” (One of those incumbents, Oracle, did not respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.)

現在的問題是：哪些技術和哪些廠商能夠最好地將這種優勢帶給客戶？光速創投公司的弗里奧尼斯也認爲，這個領域的新進者其實比守成者更有優勢，因爲“守成者們仍然盯着昨天的問題，不能毅然揚帆前進。”（其中的一個“守成者”甲骨文公司並沒有回覆《財富》的評論請求。）

Henry Baltazar, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, agrees. “The big guys are finally catching up, but they left the door open for too long,” he says. “Now it’s a battle.”

福雷斯特研究公司的高級分析師亨利o巴爾塔扎爾也表示：“大公司最終會趕上來，但是他們給創業公司留了太長時間的空子。現在，戰爭開始了。”（財富中文網）