Cloud File Storage Crystallizes Battle Between AWS, Azure and Google

A recent top news started to cover that topic with the new agreement between AWS and NetApp. Almost at the same time Google Cloud Platform (GCP) announced a new iteration for Filestore with Filestore Enterprise in addition of Filestore Basic and High Scale. The battle in that specific domain is pretty intense.

No doubt, file storage is hot as unstructured data represent the vast majority of the data volume and more and more applications leverages this model as a foundation of their data management approach. Here we don’t cover disk file system layered on block entities and we also don’t include file storage operating outside the cloud consuming cloud object storage. We essentially mean a file storage logic running within the cloud infrastructure exposing industry file sharing standard protocols like NFS and SMB or a POSIX interface with some parallel file system implementation. We also must associate global file service who run in the cloud, some players active in that domain who run exclusively outside are of course not listed here.

The current situation among the top 3 players – AWS, GCP and Azure – is radically different from one player to the other. The table below illustrates their current offering. AWS chose to develop its own products and partner with some strong solutions widely adopted on the market. The last example with FSx for NetApp ONTAP is the perfect illustration of that. They also acquire some technologies like ClearSky Data. The Seattle giant continues to articulate a rich storage portfolio with different levels and different needs. It is without any doubt the richest file storage product line among the three. The second player, Azure, is very active as well with some decisions in the past to acquire StorSimple and Avere to address specific needs in different domain and for specific workloads. Azure also picked NetApp for Azure NetApp Files. The last player, GCP, although a giant, has serious lacks in his line essentially promoting Filestore, in different flavors, a product they acquired from Elastifile. We let you imagine the GCP situation without that acquisition. And Filestore is dedicated to NFS access, what about SMB?

They all chose different paths and their offerings are very different and invite us to think about how serious is their offering in that domain. At the same time, some of them clearly wish their marketplace to be the answer for such needs. We see here again the famous model Build, Buy or Partner as these 3 actors play different game. The table below tries to summarize what these all three cloud vendors offer today.

Considering how they position themselves and articulate their message, we must add their marketplace offering as we find various offering on their web site. We have to say that some players disappeared form our original list form various reasons: acquisitions, bankruptcy, change of strategy, etc.

The interesting aspect is that more and more players are present on the 3 marketplaces. We list here 7 players: DDN, Hammerspace, Nasuni, NetApp, Panzura, Qumulo and Zadara. Of course they’re not all equal and how they are deployed are also different. But clearly their presence is paramount as users wish to consider the cloud independently of the brand. In other words, having the choice to elect a workload on any of these platforms is a priority for users.

This table confirms again that the most wide choice is AWS, the second seat is taken by GCP and Azure as they both offer a wide range of partner solutions that compensate their own offerings.

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