Enterprise Storage Capacity Has More Than Doubled Over the Past Two Years

NEW YORK, Oct. 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, released its latest Storage Study, revealing that enterprise storage capacity is more than doubling every two years, exceeding the rate of Moore's Law. Consequently, automated tiering is the hottest storage technology in 2013, as it helps keep budgets under control by enabling the use of lower-cost capacity. As enterprises struggle to define an external cloud strategy, the on-premises cloud model is gaining favor.

Conducted during the first half of 2013, TheInfoPro study identifies the storage priorities of leading organizations to provide business intelligence about technological roadmaps, budgets and vendor performance. This semiannual study is based on extensive live interviews with IT professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe.

Highlights from the TheInfoPro Storage Study include:

• Solid-state or flash is mainly a hybrid array choice for enterprises, with 37% in use, compared with only 6% for all-flash arrays.
• Decoupling of the storage hardware from the software controller presents a real market opportunity for software vendors looking to capitalize on enterprise interest in software defined storage. Only 31% of respondents viewed the coupling of storage controller hardware and software as 'very important' or 'extremely important.'
• Architecting for performance is often reactive, as 48% of large and midsize enterprises have no specific IOPS targets for applications.
• Internal cloud storage is the second most likely technology to be added to 2013 storage budgets as enterprises remain cautious about external cloud storage, which they accept as useful for email but not for general capacity. The increased demand for internal cloud storage solutions helps storage vendors as they seek to compete with Amazon S3.
• Object storage (at the heart of many service-provider cloud storage offerings) faces an education barrier in enterprises, since most still see it as a compliance solution.
• Enterprises are staying with Fibre Channel for their core storage networks, with FCoE seen as an 'edge' solution and InfiniBand as a niche for select high-performance computing deployments (12% in use).

"There are two major forces working on storage today – solid-state transforming storage architectures in datacenters, and software-defined storage transforming provisioning and capacity choices," said Marco Coulter, Vice President, TheInfoPro (a service of 451 Research). "As enterprises move from solution designers to service brokers, the conversations with business partners are evolving from bits and bytes to services and APIs."

Report author Marco Coulter will host a 451 Research Innovation webinar on October 24th (details below) to discuss the report's findings.

Webinar Details:

• Title: Making Storage Ends Meet in a Software Defined World.
• Date: October 24, 2013
• Time: 2 pm ET
• Presenters: Marco Coulter, Vice President, TheInfoPro (A Service of 451 Research)
• Registration:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/647929328

About TheInfoPro Storage Study
TheInfoPro's Storage Study relies on a proprietary network of IT professionals and is based on in-depth interviews with 260 storage professionals conducted in 1H 2013. TheInfoPro's interview methodology elicits an excellent understanding of the issues and decision-making processes related to strategic planning, technology benchmarking, and vendor selection and negotiation. TheInfoPro's Commentator Network members span a variety of industry types and levels of technology adoption. TheInfoPro screens potential commentators to ensure that they can discuss in detail their enterprises' technology roadmap and relationships with pertinent vendors. To participate, a commentator must work for a large or midsize enterprise. For the purposes of this study, large enterprises have at least $1 billion in revenue, while midsize enterprises have annual revenue between $100 million and $999 million.

About 451 Research
451 Research, a division of The 451 Group, is focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company's analysts provide critical and timely insight into the competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments. Business value is delivered via daily concise and insightful published research, periodic deeper-dive reports, data tools, market-sizing research, analyst advisory, and conferences and events. Clients of the company – at vendor, investor, service-provider and end-user organizations – rely on 451 Research's insight to support both strategic and tactical decision-making. 451 Research is headquartered in New York, with offices in key locations, including San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Boston, Seattle and Denver.

SOURCE 451 Research