2011 State Of Storage Survey

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State of Storage 2011

Handling double-digit data growth rates with single-digit budget increases is the lot of most CIOs, according to our third annual InformationWeek Analytics State of Enterprise Storage Survey. The amount of data we're actively managing continues to expand at around 20% per year, and we see a long tail of besieged IT staffs dealing with growth rates exceeding 50%. At these levels, most data centers will double storage capacity every two to three years. While nearly every company's data is growing, their IT budgets aren't always: 55% expect their IT spending to rise this year, 18% are cutting, and 26% expect it to be flat, our InformationWeek Analytics Outlook 2011 Survey finds.

What's standing between us and the vortex of doom? In a word, consolidation. We're talking the continued evolution of high-density magnetic media. Bigger, faster, and less expensive solid-state drives. Virtualization to ease management of aggregated storage pools that use available capacity more efficiently. Optimization technologies like data reduction, thin provisioning, and automatic tiering. Moving to a consolidated data/storage network won't hurt, either.

Say What?

It seems paradoxical to say consolidation is the key to taming storage, an ever-expanding resource. But there's a clear trend toward packing more data onto fewer systems and streaming more information over unified networks, as well as merged vendors consolidating more products under one corporate umbrella.

Consider hardware. New 200-GB and 400-GB SSDs are on the horizon. They're not inexpensive, but for the right use case, they can make sense. Nearly a quarter of our survey respondents have deployed SSDs, an increase of 37% in the past year, with more than half planning to increase or initiate SSD use this year. Meanwhile, capabilities that were once features requiring special-purpose hardware appliances are being integrated within array controllers. Data center consolidation, which started with servers, has spread to storage, as IT architects leverage larger arrays, faster networks, and more sophisticated management software to apply economies of scale to storage provisioning. Storage virtualization is a growth area, according to our survey.

In 2010, we also saw a wave of industry consolidation, with large storage vendors continuing a trend established in other IT markets of ceding innovation, R&D, and product prototyping to nimble startups, then gobbling up those that demonstrate superior technology and customer acceptance. In fact, many of the blockbuster tech acquisitions in the past year were driven by holes in buyers' storage portfolios. No deal topped the intrigue of Hewlett-Packard's successful bidding war with Dell over 3Par, and the year wrapped up with EMC acquiring scale-out network-attached storage leader Isilon and Dell grabbing storage area network specialist Compellent.

But don't worry that innovation will stall. While the big are getting bigger, the overall storage market continues to expand, leaving more than enough space for another round of advances.

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Research: 2011 State of Storage Consolidation, Centralization
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