Storage Trends

Every day there are gains in the IT Storage sector. Big data is on its way, but the problem remains: how to implement services and support for this growing industry segment? As more devices get into the hands of consumers, and businesses bring online more software tools to aid development and growth, we see the opportunity. Just search the Internet for open-source information; we did, and here’s what we found:

IDC – HDD Industry to Deliver More Than 300,000 Petabytes of Storage Capacity Over the Next Five Years to Enterprise Datacenters and Clouds

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22324610

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., May 3, 2010 – Despite trying economic times, and an unprecedented decline in hard disk drive (HDD) terabyte shipments for enterprise applications in 2009, HDD vendors forged ahead by introducing new HDD products/form factors that address both current and future enterprise storage market requirements. According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), HDD shipments for enterprise applications will increase from 40.5 million units in 2009 to 52.6 million units in 2014. Moreover, the HDD industry will ship more Petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.

“We’re definitely seeing intensive cost cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions,” said John Rydning, research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk. “The employment of technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, storage multitiering, and storage virtualization are all contributing to reducing end-user costs.”

Other key findings from IDC’s research include the following:

• The transition from 3.5in. to 2.5in. performance-optimized form factor HDDs will be complete by 2012
• Growing interest in new storage delivery models such as storage as a service, or storage in the cloud is likely to put greater storage capacity growth demands on Internet datacenters
• The price per gigabyte of performance-optimized HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25% to 30% per year

Also we have a video with HP’s Jimmy Daley on storage trends for the server market. Good insights to keep track of.