The storage industry continues to evolve, with hardware systems maturing and software systems reaching adolescence, according to META Group, a leading provider of information technology research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. During the past year, most technological advances have been largely incremental in nature.
Several software vendors now claim heterogeneous management capabilities, though actual functionality is often quite limited. Similarly, vendors are lining up behind the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), with many claiming "compatibility".
"SMI-S support is good news for storage users in the long-term, but META Group does not expect robust SMI-S implementations before 2006/07," said Carl Greiner, senior vice-president of META Group`s Infrastructure Strategies advisory service. "Heterogeneous functionality will be delivered in relatively small increments during the intervening time."
Storage demand has risen steadily during the past 12 to 18 months. META Group finds net annual gigabyte (GB) storage growth will average 25% to 30% for enterprise (monolithic), 45% to 50% for midrange (modular) and 80% to 85% for capacity-based (SATA/ATA). Like-for-like price/capacity will improve 35% per year.
Through 2007, storage hardware will be rendered a tiered commodity by software-based information lifecycle functionality (eg, adaptive storage resource management, data protection/recoverability, data movement, interoperability), which will become the primary enterprise storage differentiator.
"The good news is that IT organisations can select storage systems from robust competitive offerings, pursuing either a consolidated vendor approach to reduce storage management complexity or a "best in class" approach to optimise the efficiency of each technology area," said Greiner.
For an update on the vendors in the storage area network (SAN), midrange SAN, network-attached storage (NAS), and storage management software market segments, contact META Group at (011) 880-5644.
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