Some Bright Spots in Storage Market Outlook

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More .

When it comes to predicting the year ahead for the data storage market, few can see past the economy.

“Assuming the recession deepens and IT budgets are constrained if not reduced, expect people to try to continue to manage capacity growth with fewer resources,” said John Webster, an analyst at Illuminata.

“That forces them to do things like storage virtualization, cloud storage and de-duplication to try to wring all the efficiency and capacity they can out of storage that is on the floor.”

Most storage vendors concur with Webster’s view.

“One dominant trend in 2009 is storage efficiency driven by economic uncertainty,” said Larry Freeman, senior marketing manager for storage efficiency solutions at NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP). “Enterprise data growth remains constant at 30 to 60 percent per year, while IT budgets are flattening and under heavy scrutiny.”

Assuming, then, that economic challenges and advancing virtualization will continue throughout the year, let’s take a look at some of the other trends that are likely to dominate the enterprise storage market this year. The ones that come up most often in conversation with vendors and analysts are de-duplication, cloud computing and iSCSI, all of which promise to do more with less, and one technology that might actually buck the trend: flash-based solid state drives (SSDs).

Talkin’ ‘Bout De-duplication

Dedupe has become almost a cause célèbre in the storage world. As well as the pure play specialists like Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), the likes of Quantum (NYSE: QTM), Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), EMC (NYSE: EMC) and HP (NYSE: HPQ) have taken up the banner and are either offering it or partnering with others to provide it to customers.

“The economic situation in 2009 is going to drive customers to actively seek ways to increase the utilization of their existing infrastructure,” said Janae Lee, vice president of marketing at Quantum. “As well as virtualization, customers will increasingly adopt de-duplicated disk solutions to provide a disk tier for their backup environment which is 10 times more cost-effective than native disk, freeing the disk storage currently used for this purpose to be used to satisfy growth needs in primary disk storage.”

A state of the data center survey commissioned by Symantec found that de-duplication is one of the most in-demand technologies, with 70 percent pursuing it, behind storage virtualization at 76 percent, according to Marty Ward, senior director of product marketing for the data protection group at Symantec.

Analysts are making similar predictions.

“De-duplication is becoming a must-have across the board in data protection,” said Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Forecast Includes Clouds

Another common thread among vendors and analysts is cloud computing. Variously defined and tending to either embrace Storage as a Service (SaaS) or accompany it, the term has certainly captured the imagination of the multitudes.

“A new administration, unprecedented financial turmoil and ongoing conflicts overseas will require global organizations in 2009 to be much smarter in how they evaluate and manage risk,” said Philippe Jarre, general manager of business continuity and resiliency services at IBM (NYSE: IBM). “From a technology perspective, that trend is driving many companies to evaluate the role cloud services can play in cost-effectively and efficiently addressing the risk management imperative, while guaranteeing the most stringent standards for business security, continuity and resiliency, and compliance.”

The Symantec survey had SaaS scoring at 64 percent. No wonder HP is firmly on the bandwagon, spurred on by the huge amounts of storage required by cloud mainstays such as internet search engines, Web-based e-mail and social networking services (see Facebook Friends Storage Vendors).

“The common thread of cloud is inexpensive storage, easily managed at petabyte levels that easily scale and is designed to support cloud-like services,” said Kyle Fitze, director of marketing in the storage platforms division at HP.

In the past, deploying a storage-intensive cloud-based service required a lot of custom development and so was only possible for companies that really wanted to devote themselves to being in the cloud services business, such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) or HP’s Snapfish online photo sharing service. Over the last year, the components needed to support the cloud have become more packaged and available, driving the creation of new services and even allowing some enterprises to deploy internal clouds.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com.