infoTECH Feature

December 06, 2013

Cloud Driving Down External Disk Demand

There has long been an unwritten rule in storage – the demand for disk is unquenchable.

That’s because storage demands have long outstripped the acquisition of new disks themselves.

Forrester Research (News - Alert) said that from 2010 to 2012, enterprise backup volumes rose 42 percent. On the flip side, file storage capacity only went up 28 percent. The Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro Group also sees enterprise storage growing – they peg that rate at 50 percent a year, while the Enterprise Strategy Group places it around 60 percent.

In the midst of all this madness, IDC (News - Alert) now says sales of external disks went down 3.5 percent this past quarter on a year over year basis. The worldwide annual market is $5.7 billion for the third quarter.

“Despite the revenue contraction in the third quarter, we see strong demand for offerings targeted at heavily virtualized environment’s, such as integrated infrastructure," said Eric Sheppard, Research Director, IDC Storage. "However, this demand has been offset by several factors: reduced spending from the U.S. government, increased use of storage efficiency technologies, increased investment in public cloud capacity, and general price pressures associated with increased competitive environments.”

Disks Down, Cloud Storage Up

The hot action in storage is the cloud, and the innovation is often coming from smaller companies and startups. And IT finally trusts the cloud to handle critical data, and also look to the cloud to reduce the storage administrative burden.

A report distributed by Research and Markets “Cloud Storage Market (Incl. Cloud Storage Gateways, Backup & Recovery, Data Movement & Access, Data Replication, Hsm & Archiving, Security And Storage Resource Management Solutions) - Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2012 - 2018)”, find a lot of movement in this area.

“Emergence of innovative storage technologies such as inline data deduplication, inline compression, WAN optimization, cloud based security solutions and storage gateways are pushing the growth of the Cloud Storage Market. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are rapidly adopting cloud based storage services to reduce cost and IT complexity compared to large enterprises, thereby pushing the market growth,” the research house said. “The small and medium business segments are the major adopter of cloud storage services and this trend is expected to continue for next few years.”




Edited by Ryan Sartor
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