TheInfoPro Releases Latest Storage Study 

TheInfoPro released its latest Storage Study, revealing that enterprise storage capacity is more than doubling every two years, exceeding the rate of Moore's Law. Consequently, automated tiering is the hottest storage technology in 2013, as it helps keep budgets under control by enabling the use of lower-cost capacity. As enterprises struggle to define an external cloud strategy, the on-premises cloud model is gaining favor.

Conducted during the first half of 2013, TheInfoPro study identifies the storage priorities of leading organizations to provide business intelligence about technological roadmaps, budgets and vendor performance. This semiannual study is based on extensive live interviews with IT professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North Americaand Europe.

Highlights from the TheInfoPro Storage Study include:

• Solid-state or flash is mainly a hybrid array choice for enterprises, with 37% in use, compared with only 6% for all-flash arrays.
• Decoupling of the storage hardware from the software controller presents a real market opportunity for software vendors looking to capitalize on enterprise interest in software defined storage. Only 31% of respondents viewed the coupling of storage controller hardware and software as 'very important' or 'extremely important.'
• Architecting for performance is often reactive, as 48% of large and midsize enterprises have no specific IOPS targets for applications.
• Internal cloud storage is the second most likely technology to be added to 2013 storage budgets as enterprises remain cautious about external cloud storage, which they accept as useful for email but not for general capacity. The increased demand for internal cloud storage solutions helps storage vendors as they seek to compete with Amazon S3.
• Object storage (at the heart of many service-provider cloud storage offerings) faces an education barrier in enterprises, since most still see it as a compliance solution.
• Enterprises are staying with Fibre Channel for their core storage networks, with FCoE seen as an 'edge' solution and InfiniBand as a niche for select high-performance computing deployments (12% in use).

"There are two major forces working on storage today – solid-state transforming storage architectures in datacenters, and software-defined storage transforming provisioning and capacity choices," said Marco Coulter, Vice President, TheInfoPro (a service of 451 Research). "As enterprises move from solution designers to service brokers, the conversations with business partners are evolving from bits and bytes to services and APIs."