Why there’s no end in sight to storage growth

1. Dramatic drop in storage cost per GB. 1 TB storage units are hitting consumer price points. 16 TB storage systems are hitting SMB price points. Massive quantities of storage are now within the mass market’s reach.  And It’s only going to get cheaper.
2. Increases in storage efficiency. Deduplication, auto-storage tiering, low-power disk drives and MAID are going mainstream, dramatically increasing the ratios of usable information per $, per square foot and per Watt.
3. Virtualization. Server virtualization from VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix, VTL maturation, and the thin client movement are goosing storage use because storage is so easily added from a central pool.  SAN scale with DAS implementation ease.

Do you buy this reasoning? I don’t. These are real trends, and positive. But they are based on the premise of “build it and they will come”.

Tune in on Monday for the real reasons storage will continue to blow the doors off projections for the next 5 years.