Top 15 Storage Trends

Need of capacity
There is no reason that 2011 will be worse than 2010, once more a good year for the worldwide storage industry as the need of capacity never stops, largely compensating the diminishing prices per gigabyte.

Virtualization
Virtualization is everywhere and will continue to push enhanced storage subsystems.

Slower consolidation
Now that big guys like Dell, EMC and HP have spent a lot of millions of dollars to acquire storage companies, 2011 will probably be a quieter year in term of big deals. But we see several ones in online backup where there are too many actors, no real leader, and more and more gigabytes for free.

EMC/Dell
After the acquisition of EqualLogic and Compellent by Dell, the relationship with EMC has never been worse. Rupture in 2011?

IPO
We also don't see a lot of IPO next year as Wall Street continues to be convinced that storage is not a great investment.

HDD/SSD
Floppy disks have been killed. Tape and optical media continue to be under pressure against hard disk drives that will finally beat all of them but one, SSD, today with a relatively small market but that will expand and replace progressively HDDs for all applications needing performance, small footprint rather than high capacity.

Convergence
2011 will be the year of the beginning of FCoE and convergence with an interesting competition between 16Gb FC and 10GBE.

Cloud
Cloud-based storage solutions will be enhanced and will use new technologies to accelerate their bandwidth.

No killer app
After de-dupe, we don't see any new technology that could be a real killer app for the storage industry.

Storage in a box
An interesting idea proposed by some start-ups could have a good success: an all-in-one storage systems for primary, secondary (backup) and archiving in one box with automatic tiering between SSDs, fast and fat HDDs, with all the software included.

No more RAID
The idea is to replace traditional RAID controllers by disseminating block of data on storage devices connected on the network.

After GMR
We are not far from the limit of HDD in term of areal density, a key factor to increase the capacity. At least two technologies are in competition to follow GMR. HAMR or patterned media? Maybe the answer will be known in 2011.

USB 3.0
The new fast and low-cost interface is able to replace about all the other ones (USB 2.0, FW, eSATA) except PCIe. A faster implementation of USB 3.0 depends on one company: Intel.

Email archiving
Among the storage applications, email backup and archiving will be the big one.

No more backup
Replication will progressively replaces traditional on-site backup.