IDC seeing double for storage systems

IDC released their Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

What it says is double digit growth for storage systems…

  • 18.8% total disk storage systems growth to $6.7B year over year
  • 55.2% growth in disk capacity shipped to 3,397 Petabytes year over year
  • Open networked disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open/iSCSI SAN) grew 26.3% year over year
  • Open SAN market grew 20.3% year over year
  • NAS market grew 44.6% year over year

What it means is the market is taking all of the capacity storage system manufacturers can throw at them. Maybe it’s pent up demand, or maybe it’s growth in high capacity low cost nearline drive based solutions. In IDC’s Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems forecast for 2009-2013, IDC indicates the largest growth sectors on a percentage basis are lower cost solutions (sub $5,000), and those factors having the highest impact on the market include:

  • Economy – uncertainty prohibits companies from investing capital
  • Policy – regulations on industries are driving security & compliance investment as a result of streamlined operations.
  • Capacity – lower cost capacity optimized disk drives accelerate capacity growth but limit revenue growth
  • Convergence – technology industries continue to collide as more video, data, voice networks become one.

Not surprising that the nearline market continue to explode as more data is generated and in need of infrequent use-based storage.

At what point does the process of the generation of data and content saturate the high performance storage businesses have in place today? Server and storage manufacturers keep asking for bigger, faster, lower power mission critical drives like the Savvio 10K. With capacities reaching 600GB and transfer rates approaching 200MB/s, these drives are positioned to be the saving grace for such saturation.

Everyone agrees that nearline drives are the answer to how we handle explosive data growth. My questions is:  at what point will we be saying we cannot create the data fast enough?

Related Posts:

300,000 beautiful Petabytes (and mostly enterprise)
Reaping the rewards of the Creation Continuum
They’re back…watch storage continue to grow
Pent up demand…45 Terabytes worth

image by: drspinello.com

2010-06-14T13:57:04+00:00

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