Winning Storage Technologies and Vendors in 2010

After a year of heavy server and storage consolidation that slowed big-ticket spending throughout IT organizations, TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, released new data recently showing further effects of the recession on Fortune 1000 and midsize enterprise (MSE) storage organizations.

The in-depth study, which is based on interviews with storage decision-makers in North America and Europe, reveals that while 45% of F1000 respondents plan to increase storage spending in the coming months, 29% still expect major budget decreases. In contrast, 41% of MSEs plan to increase storage spending this year, while 25% expect further reductions.

"Major spending increases won’t resume until new business application installs once again create massive demands on storage needs," said Rob Stevenson, managing director of storage research for TheInfoPro. "In the interim, storage shops will focus on productivity improvement and hardware inventory adjustments to prepare for virtualization and cloud support needs."

TheInfoPro’s Heat Indexes
Identify Early Trends in Technology Adoption
TheInfoPro’s Storage Networking Heat Index and Storage Backup and Recovery Technology Heat Index are widely regarded as effective measures of user ‘demand’ for a technology, and from a vendor’s perspective, good indicators of the relative size of the market opportunity.

In the latest study these have identified deduplication and primary storage data reduction as topping the needs of the F1000 and MSEs. The F1000 respondents planned use of solid-state disk (SSD), 8Gbps Fibre Channel and virtual server data management also showed up well.

Other Heat Index highlights include:

• Increasing importance among the F1000 and MSEs of thin provisioning, email archiving, information lifecycle management and storage resource management.
• Clear trends toward an expansion of automated tiering and provisioning, and backup virtualization management. Also of particular interest is the growth in block virtualization MSEs are planning in 2010.
• MSE storage decision-makers plan to expand remote replication; 10GbE networking and enterprise serial-attached SCSI (SAS).

Study Identifies
Winners and Losers Among Storage Vendors
The current study shows that each of the F1000’s most exciting vendors – EMC, NetApp and IBM – had a good year in 2009.

• EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain boosted EMC’s deduplication in use share of the F1000 from around 5% to 25%.
• Among the F1000 organizations interviewed, EMC’s V-Max refresh rates appear to be driving the majority of the SSD discussions. In use responses quadrupled from six months ago.
• Symantec, EMC and IBM appear consistently in the top five solution providers list for email archiving. IBM’s in use activity in the F1000 grew the fastest compared to the previous study, while both Symantec and CommVault showed considerable improvement.
• Among MSEs, Compellent, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems are seen as being among the most exciting vendors, while the top three in use leaders are EMC, NetApp and Compellent.
• Among the F1000, EMC, NetApp and IBM top the most exciting technology list. However, NetApp, EMC, IBM and HDS are all in a close race for dominance in virtualized provisioning, with EMC having a slight edge.