Networked Storage Capacity in F1000 Will Grow 24% This Year

TheInfoPro, a division of leading analyst and data company The 451 Group, released its latest storage study, which points toward significant growth in the storage industry and outlines the key market factors and main players driving that growth. The study is completed biannually, and is based on hour-long interviews with storage professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America.

"The storage market continues to be the best performing – from a spending perspective – of all the IT sectors we cover with our voice-of-the-customer research methodology," said Ken Male, Managing Director and Founder of TheInfoPro. "We have been studying the storage market since 2002, and saw in our latest biannual study that storage expansion is being driven by new application growth – this is an excellent proxy for the health of the companies we interview because it shows that business units are making bets on new projects."

Key trends from TheInfoPro Storage Study include:

• Networked storage capacity in the F1000 will grow a projected 24% this year, with 44% of organizations expecting to increase spending and 31% anticipating stable spending. The spending projections nearly mirror what was captured for 2010.
• The study suggests that 2011 will be a year of strong competition for unified storage leadership. Currently, EMC is the lead vendor for Fibre Channel (FC) storage, while NetApp is the lead vendor for network-attached storage (NAS).
• Automated tiering is creating a reason to refresh array technology, which benefits solid-state disk (SSD). Both technologies score high in TIP’s proprietary Technology Heat Index, which gauges net new implementations by the F1000, detailing the vendors poised to benefit.
• Virtual server protection choices may threaten traditional backup software solutions. Rather than traditional methods used to protect physical servers, half of the respondents are using snapshots and replication at the storage level. With this in place, those using backup for protection, rather than archiving, can confidently switch or perhaps remove the traditional backup vendors knowing they have an alternative protection.
• Appliance model is gaining interest – it’s not yet a trend, but there is increasing discussion of Oracle Exadata, VCE Vblock and other appliances.
• HP’s 3PAR acquisition creates excitement, but is not yet translating to increased spending.
• SAN is beating NAS for server virtualization capacity.
• Less than one in 10 organizations have plans to use external cloud storage even for lower tiers, including archive.

"Server virtualization transformed storage architectures, and cloud computing is having the same impact," says Marco Coulter, TheInfoPro’s Research Director of Storage. "In this study, we focused on both of these themes, identifying the selection criteria used and the vendors meeting expectations. While all the M&A in 2010 might stifle innovation, the cloud alternatives out there are energizing storage professionals to be creative in delivering services."

About TheInfoPro Storage Study
TheInfoPro Storage Study was completed in April 2011, and takes an in-depth look at key trends across the storage industry, as well as the performance of individual vendors. The study is completed biannually, and is based on hour-long interviews with storage professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America. The interview results are collected in comprehensive research reports that provide continuous business intelligence within key areas, such as technological road maps, spending plans and vendor performance.

A sampling of other vendors covered in the Vendor Performance and Technology Roadmap components of the study include: Cisco, Brocade, HDS, IBM, HP, Symantec, Dell, CommVault, QLogic, Emulex, Quantum, Sepaton, Violin Scalable Memory, CA Technologies, Sepaton, FalconStor, Pillar Data Systems, Xiotech, BlueArc, Texas Memory Systems, Data Robotics, Virtual Instruments, Autonomy and F5.