From a capacity perspective, capacity shipped in 2012 was 31PB, compared with 27.5EB for the enterprise storage array segment and 251PB for the I/O intensive segment and IDC forecasts capacity shipped in 2016 will increase to 611PB with a 2012–2016 CAGR of 110.8%.
The use of SSS technology is not new to the enterprise. In fact, both battery backed DRAM systemsand nonvolatile NAND flash memory have been used for a number of years. However, advancements in semiconductor technology and the growing use of NAND flash in the consumer market have pushed NAND flash based SSDs into the enterprise as a cost effective solution to deliver higher performance and improved responsiveness while mitigating some inefficiencies within existing hard disk drive (HDD) based infrastructures In the all flash array (AFA) market,there are fundamentally two architectures regarding the underlying flash media.
IDC expects storage to continue to be a hot market in 2013. Major trends such as Big Data and cloud will continue to spur innovation. With the economy looking a bit better, many businesses may increase their spending; in particular, companies will turn increasingly to the public cloud to manage the growth of unstructured data as well as control costs.
This Vendor Spotlight explores the trends in cloud-based storage services and discusses the role that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) plays in this important market.
The "bring your own device" (BYOD) trend will continue to shape IT and have an impact on corporate sync-n-share solutions. IDC expects sync-n-share services to be the next front for storage solutions providers. As the user base moves from laptops to mobile devices, IT organizations are eager to find suitable alternatives to traditional file-based solutions that fall short of meeting newer requirements. As many IT organizations and their users can attest, NFS- and SMB/CIFS-based file sharing solutions do not work with tablets and smartphones. Prosumers and consumers also need a smart sync-n-share solution that augments corporate file infrastructure so they can keep their personal data separate from office data without having to switch devices.
This Technology Spotlight explores the trends in file sharing technologies and discusses the role that Hitachi Data Systems plays in this important market.
This IDC study* assesses the capabilities and business strategies of leading vendors in the scale-out file-based storage market. Vendors were selected based on their capabilities to provide an appliance-based scale-out file-based storage solution, which features a distributed or scalable or clustered file system at the core. This evaluation is based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that gauge the success of a vendor to be successful in delivering a scale-out file-based storage solution in the market.
* Note: This document
is an excerpt of all HDS-relevant content from the larger report and
does not include assessments of the other vendors in the
study.
Storage solutions are increasingly being delivered in new form factors where multiple storage functions are integrated together to provide greater value and a consistent user experience regardless of the shape or form initially purchased. This development has contributed to the emergence of "entry-level enterprise" storage technologies that can provide small to midsize companies with converged, enterprise-class storage features and therefore datacenter efficiencies at a lower price point. This Market Spotlight describes the drivers and business challenges fueling the growing interest in entry-level enterprise storage solutions. The paper examines the functionality and benefits a converged storage architecture provides and explains why businesses no longer have to spend more to get the enterprise-level technology best suited to their data storage needs.
The need to stretch the IT dollar without compromising form or function is leading enterprises to push suppliers to offer a new breed of “entry-level enterprise” storage solutions. Such solutions are designed to deliver value to businesses with a focus on changing requirements such as multi-protocol access, enterprise-level features, and purpose-built architecture for unified and virtualized environments. In addition to this value, vendors are taking the concept of entry-level enterprise to the next level by offering platform commonality with their enterprise arrays, making them cost effective for midsize enterprises to deploy such storage solutions in their primary datacenters, and/or for larger enterprises to deploy them in their secondary or disaster-recovery environments.
The oil and gas industry is a data-driven business. The industry depends on information technology (IT) to increase the speed of finding oil, enhance oil production, and reduce health, safety, and environment risks that come with equipment failure or operator error. Processing large volumes of data for reservoir modeling or simulation is not new. What has changed is the availability of new technology based on commodity hardware — Big Data and analytics. This new technology can process high volumes of a variety of data types with different access patterns at relatively quicker speeds than conventional technology.
IT departments are under constant pressure to realign themselves in response to the fast-changing business climate and new technology developments, such as virtualization, cloud-based services, and mobile devices. In this white paper, IDC uses a survey of 201 IT leaders in North America conducted in February 2012 to delve into the storage and information management challenges IT departments face today. It probes into perceptions about the major IT trends affecting data storage (e.g., cloud storage services, Big Data) and provides insights into the storage solutions that organizations are using to address these challenges.
Organizations of all sizes have been experiencing considerable pressures on storage budgets, costs, capacity, and performance for quite some time. Many of these pressures can be traced back to the long-standing practice of utilizing separate arrays for supporting block- and file-based applications. While many new technologies can be used to help alleviate these pressures, one of the more important technologies available that can help is unified storage — an external disk storage system that can provide block and file access on an integrated architecture with a common management interface. Organizations that have long utilized separate arrays for file- and block-based workloads can look to consolidate these workloads onto a unified storage platform to help drive down costs, improve storage resource utilization, and increase management efficiencies.
The expansion of business-critical information and rich content within extended enterprises continues to change the storage and data management dynamic in a wide range of industries and organizations. In addition, the impact of virtualized server and desktop images on datacenter design and operations is growing. More and more businesses are looking to virtualize their server infrastructure, which allows them to consolidate IT assets and gives them greater flexibility to add resources on a just-in-time basis. Server virtualization has been a high priority in large businesses for several years and is of growing importance in medium-sized and small businesses, but limitations in many legacy storage systems are driving development of more unified (block and file) storage systems, which IDC calls multiprotocol storage systems.
The ability to balance near-term priorities shaped by economic conditions with longer-term industry and technology changes associated with rapid data growth is critical for today's successful IT team. Senior executives want to transform IT so that they can react more quickly to significant positive or negative changes in the business environment while minimizing corporate risk.
In the past decade, the enterprise storage systems market went through a significant transformation. Storage evolved from being just a peripheral technology to become an integral part of corporate datacenters. Storage systems are now playing a crucial role in business operations, enabling the uninterrupted work of mission-critical applications and ensuring the availability of the right data at the right time in the right place. In the fall 2011 edition of the Storage User Demand Study (SUDS), IDC estimated that more than half of the terabytes of external storage systems shipped from 2009 through the first half of 2011 were shipped in support of major applications, including, among others, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft applications.
Multiprotocol storage (MPS) systems, often referred to by the storage industry as "unified" storagesystems, have become a popular storage option for many organizations. With the exponential growthof unstructured data, all organizations are in need of block-based and file-based (and/or objectbased)storage systems to accommodate structured and unstructured data. By delivering a storagesystem that can provide storage with multiple protocols to manage structured and unstructured datasimultaneously, storage vendors aim to be the single provider of data storage for any givenorganization. IDC forecasts that by 2015, MPS systems will be a $13.6 billion market, or 47.9% of thetotal external storage market, more than doubling the 21.0% share of the total external storagemarket in 2010.
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