????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(yè)信息都被儲存在所謂的“旋轉(zhuǎn)式磁盤”之中。這種存儲速度相對較慢，但比較便宜的存儲設(shè)備，很容易讓人回憶起唱片機(jī)。在這個領(lǐng)域里競爭的制造商也為數(shù)不多。關(guān)系數(shù)據(jù)庫（也就是用來構(gòu)建存儲數(shù)據(jù)的軟件）產(chǎn)業(yè)，當(dāng)時基本上是甲骨文公司的天下。

????整個行業(yè)沿著這個方向發(fā)展了很多年，但很快一切都變了。

????首先是蘋果已故CEO史蒂夫?喬布斯不愿繼續(xù)在iPod便攜式音樂播放器中使用旋轉(zhuǎn)式磁盤，轉(zhuǎn)而使用質(zhì)量更輕，也更節(jié)能的固態(tài)硬盤。光速創(chuàng)投合伙人約翰?弗里奧尼斯指出，由于當(dāng)時iPod的銷量極大，這項決定推動了閃存在消費(fèi)電子設(shè)備中的使用。閃存的價格也開始顯著下降。各大企業(yè)和他們的數(shù)據(jù)中心也很快跟上了這一潮流。

????弗里奧尼斯表示：“閃存的性能與內(nèi)存相似，但它比旋轉(zhuǎn)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(nèi)存的性能優(yōu)勢，同時享受到幾乎像硬盤一樣低廉的價格?！?/p>

????另外一個推動因素，則是普通用戶平均每天存取的數(shù)據(jù)量出現(xiàn)了巨大飛躍，而這主要?dú)w功于聯(lián)網(wǎng)移動設(shè)備的快速興起。在消費(fèi)者層面上，任何人只要有一部智能手機(jī)，都與這種趨勢相關(guān)。在企業(yè)界，數(shù)據(jù)量開始迅速增大，由此催生了一個現(xiàn)在被稱為“大數(shù)據(jù)”的新興領(lǐng)域。

????最后一個因素是存儲行業(yè)開始轉(zhuǎn)向軟件定義存儲，這種存儲技術(shù)使用了廉價、分散的硬件（而不是集中的大型箱式機(jī)）實現(xiàn)了規(guī)模效益，可以輕易地并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，然后再單獨(dú)選擇操作系統(tǒng)一樣，人們也想先買硬件，然后再單獨(dú)買存儲軟件?！?/p>

????將所有這些趨勢聚集在一起，你能得到什么結(jié)論？那就是存儲市場已經(jīng)發(fā)展到變革的邊緣，很多創(chuàng)業(yè)公司爭相使之發(fā)生。弗里奧尼斯認(rèn)為：“一股巨大的推動力正在給予所有這些創(chuàng)業(yè)公司一個機(jī)會，他們現(xiàn)在幾乎是不可阻擋的。”

????每年10億美元

????在企業(yè)存儲領(lǐng)域下了重注的風(fēng)投還有很多，弗里奧尼斯的公司只是其中之一。在這個領(lǐng)域中競爭的創(chuàng)業(yè)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。）

????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公司也于二月在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公司也于同月在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。

????451 Research公司自從2000年起就開始關(guān)注企業(yè)存儲領(lǐng)域，該公司的存儲與信息管理研究副總裁西蒙?羅賓遜指出，總體來看，在過去幾年里，向企業(yè)存儲類創(chuàng)業(yè)公司已披露的投資，基本上每年都能達(dá)到10億美元左右。

????羅賓遜表示：“這類初創(chuàng)公司層出不窮，你剛覺得行業(yè)的這一波存儲潮結(jié)束了，馬上就會迎來另一波。過去十年，這個領(lǐng)域基本上一直都處于創(chuàng)新期?！?/p>

????每一波的創(chuàng)新浪潮基本上都集中于某一特定功能，大量創(chuàng)業(yè)公司都在圍繞一個類似的主題。羅賓遜指出：“有些創(chuàng)業(yè)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，然后上市。然后某家大公司就會踏足進(jìn)來，花高價收購它們?！?/p>

????比如Data Domain公司就于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(chuàng)業(yè)公司?；萜眨℉ewlett-Packard）則于2010年買下了3PAR公司；戴爾（Dell）于2011年收購了Compellent Technologies公司。類似的收購還有很多。

????羅賓遜指出：“需要注意的是，這個領(lǐng)域大約有五六家大廠商，基本上沒有人在中游，然后就是一大堆創(chuàng)業(yè)公司。在過去10年里，這張‘演員表’基本上沒怎么大變?！?/p>

????SolidFire公司創(chuàng)始人兼CEO戴夫?萊特表示，他的公司2013年的年增率達(dá)到700%，而每個季度都比上一季度增長50%。他認(rèn)為，這主要?dú)w功于影響行業(yè)的兩個“重大的變革浪潮”。

????首先是向閃存和固態(tài)硬盤的轉(zhuǎn)變。他表示：“它非常有顛覆性，在未來幾年，存儲市場將有相當(dāng)一部分向閃存轉(zhuǎn)型?！保⊿olidFire主要提供全閃存系統(tǒng)，同時重點(diǎn)提供數(shù)據(jù)中心的擴(kuò)展存儲。）

????不過與此同時，萊特也看低這股趨勢，認(rèn)為它只是“一種較為短期的顛覆式轉(zhuǎn)型——人人都在做它?！?/p>

????從萊特的觀點(diǎn)看，更有意思的則是第二個重大轉(zhuǎn)型，也就是企業(yè)從傳統(tǒng)的所謂孤立式數(shù)據(jù)架構(gòu)向云架構(gòu)的轉(zhuǎn)變。這種轉(zhuǎn)變正在影響整個行業(yè)，但是“很多存儲類創(chuàng)業(yè)公司并沒有真正適應(yīng)這種轉(zhuǎn)變?！彼€表示：“這就是我們?yōu)槭裁凑J(rèn)為我們在長期會更加成功，因為SolidFire是目前唯一專門為云計算浪潮構(gòu)建的專用架構(gòu)?！?/p>

????尋找簡單性

????羅賓遜認(rèn)為，如今存儲類創(chuàng)業(yè)公司面臨的挑戰(zhàn)之一，是要簡化過去那種非常復(fù)雜和碎片化的格局。它正是過去十年很多以功能為重點(diǎn)的研發(fā)所造成的結(jié)果。

????他表示：“大公司有很多存儲系統(tǒng)，其中每個系統(tǒng)都服務(wù)于一個特定的用途。企業(yè)所面臨的挑戰(zhàn)不僅僅是數(shù)據(jù)量的增長，還有如何管理這種環(huán)境，因為這些系統(tǒng)可能包括了七八個獨(dú)立的存儲系統(tǒng)，極其復(fù)雜?！?/p>

????換句話說，簡單性是一個新的目標(biāo)。這種趨勢使得整個行業(yè)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(shè)備上）和“高度融度”模式（將存儲、計算、網(wǎng)絡(luò)和虛擬化整合到同一臺設(shè)備上）的流行也反映了這種轉(zhuǎn)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。

????與此同時，應(yīng)用軟件的熱潮（包括內(nèi)部應(yīng)用、面向顧客的應(yīng)用，往往還有移動應(yīng)用）依然沒有減退，這也加大了企業(yè)的壓力，迫使它們不得不提高數(shù)據(jù)庫和存儲系統(tǒng)的性能和速度。

????Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers公司（該公司是DataStax和PernixData公司的投資方，其合伙人墨菲也是PernixData的董事會成員）的合伙人馬特?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(yán)重，因為移動網(wǎng)絡(luò)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(jī)會。在存儲、計算和網(wǎng)絡(luò)等所有層面上，每家公司都在想方設(shè)法地獲得這種額外優(yōu)勢?！?/p>

????現(xiàn)在的問題是：哪些技術(shù)和哪些廠商能夠最好地將這種優(yōu)勢帶給客戶？光速創(chuàng)投公司的弗里奧尼斯也認(rèn)為，這個領(lǐng)域的新進(jìn)者其實比守成者更有優(yōu)勢，因為“守成者們?nèi)匀欢⒅蛱斓膯栴}，不能毅然揚(yáng)帆前進(jìn)。”（其中的一個“守成者”甲骨文公司并沒有回復(fù)《財富》的評論請求。）

????福雷斯特研究公司的高級分析師亨利?巴爾塔扎爾也表示：“大公司最終會趕上來，但是他們給創(chuàng)業(yè)公司留了太長時間的空子?，F(xiàn)在，戰(zhàn)爭開始了?！保ㄘ敻恢形木W(wǎng)）

????譯者：樸成奎

????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.

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

????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.

????“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.”

????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.”

????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.

????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.”

????$1 billion per year

????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.)

????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.

????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.

????“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.”

????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.”

????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.

????“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.”

????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.

????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.)

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

????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.”

????‘Looking for simplicity’

????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.

????“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.”

????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.

????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.

????“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.”

????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.)

????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.”