Gartner Releases a New Report on External Controller-Based Disk Storage Market

In its new report, titled “Forecast: External Cloud Opportunity for the Disk Storage Array Market, Worldwide, 2010-2015,” Gartner (News - Alert) predicts that worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue from external cloud computing deployments will to $1.45 billion in 2015.

In the overall market for ECB storage, ECB disk storage deployed in the external cloud today forms a very small portion. Gartner estimates that external cloud deployment constituted only 1.4 percent of overall ECB disk storage vendor revenue in 2010.

However, as many external cloud services are still at the early build-out stage, this segment will grow much faster than the overall market, the company stated in a press release.

“We believe the SaaS (News - Alert) providers offer the largest cloud opportunity for ECB disk storage vendors in the short term, as many software service vendors lack a hardware portfolio and may lack the resources to develop their own infrastructure hardware,” said Pushan Rinnen, research director at Gartner. “However, SaaS-based vendor revenue will grow much slower than the combined growth rate of cloud application infrastructure and cloud system infrastructure through 2015. Therefore, we believe IaaS will represent a larger long-term opportunity.”

Offering storage and servers/applications together and requiring the high availability, reliability and performance of some commercial disk storage arrays, the vast majority of cloud opportunities for ECB disk storage vendors lies with SaaS and comprehensive IaaS providers, according to Gartner analysts.

Some extremely large cloud providers, such as Google (News - Alert), Amazon and Facebook, have deep pockets for internal R&D to develop their own storage infrastructure with commodity hardware, the report stated.

Recently, the company released a study that analyzed mobile device management solutions from 13 different providers. The results clearly showed that Zenprise, Mobile Active Defense and MobileIron scored highest overall, with Good Technology (News - Alert) ranked as the “best single email-centric solution for secure enterprise mobile email.”

Gartner first looked at over 60 vendors within the mobile device management industry and then looked in-depth at different client-side and server-based solutions for both on-premises and cloud delivery models.