The emergence of more content-centric businesses will
boost considerably the overall demand for storage systems according
to new data released by IDC.
The study,
‘Worldwide Disk
Storage Systems 2008–2012 Forecast: Content-Centric Customers —
Reshaping Market Demand’ forecasts the worldwide disk storage
systems market for 2008–2012 and predicts that from 2007 to 2012
worldwide disk storage systems capacity shipments will continue to
more than double every two years, growing at a compound annual
growth rate of nearly 53%.
IDC adds that in 2012, spending will pass the $34 billion mark
and that from a spending and terabyte shipment perspectives,
capacity-optimised storage will account for more than half of the
market in 2012.
Past market drivers, such as the digitalisation of content,
disk-based data protection, and long-term data retention, should
continue to make positive contributions to
storage capacity growth, but the research firm sees multiple
business trends and new technologies forcing a restructuring of
systems and the industry over the next five years. In particular
the focus for organisations will increasingly be based on boosting
storage utilisation levels through new technologies such as thin
provisioning and data deduplication.
However IDC warns that one of the most critical challenges for
the storage industry over the next several years will be to gauge
the impact of new network-centric and content-centric datacenters
on more traditional customers. It says that as more organisations
begin to create and archive large pools of file-based content, many
will want solutions that have similar features/functions/price
points to those being delivered to leading content depots.
“New enterprise datacentre designs based on the principles of
massive consolidation, extensive
virtualisation, and unified connectivity will drive new storage
systems designs, including greater use of tier-zero storage
leveraging solid state drives. The most important new force is the
emergence of content-rich business applications in areas such as
telecommunications, media/entertainment, and Web 2.0," explained
Natalya Yezhkova, research manager for storage systems at IDC.