O’Haire noted that Gartner recently put the percentage of enterprise data in the cloud at only 5%. “I believe the bigger reason for [the IDC figures] decline is that customers are realising that the traditional SAN has too many shortcomings when dealing with highly virtualised environments or projects requiring high performance, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and big data,” said O’Haire.
“I believe the bigger reason for decline is that customers are realising that the traditional SAN has too many shortcomings when dealing with highly virtualised environments or projects requiring high performance, such as virtual desktop infrastructure and big data,” Francis O’Haire, DataSolutions
Customers, he continued, are looking for “higher performance with lower cost and complexity” when building infrastructure for new projects. “As a result, they are spending money with newer vendors who have designed their solutions for the modern data centre and have no existing legacy portfolio to protect,” he said.
Innovation cost
Elsewhere, Chris Johnson, EMEA vice president and general manager with HP’s storage division attributed some of the high storage spending decline on the “relatively high cost” of the latest innovations in storage technology.
“Within recent years, many leading storage vendors have focused on expanding all-flash offerings. While these systems offer faster and more predictable response times, the higher price point (as compared to traditional enterprise-class disk-based storage architectures), as well as limited scalability and resiliency have presented barriers to widespread adoption of newer all-flash arrays,” said Johnson.
Johnson also noted that that up until very recently, the performance benefits of flash storage could not be achieved without “compensating” in terms of price, availability and overall reliability “guaranteed” by legacy systems. He said that while the high end portion of the market has declined “flash spending will continue to increase”, with separate IDC forecasts predicting that by 2016 the market for all-flash storage arrays will jump to €1.16 billion — representing a “59% compound annual growth rate over the 2012-2016 forecast period”.
“As the price per gigabyte for flash media becomes comparable with that of traditional enterprise-class disk-based storage, more enterprises will find it feasible to implement all-flash offerings for various workloads,” Chris Johnson, HP
“As the price per gigabyte for flash media becomes comparable with that of traditional enterprise-class disk-based storage, more enterprises will find it feasible to implement all-flash offerings for various workloads,” added Johnson.
Legacy, proprietary
Taking an overview of the current market, Peter Trevaskis, Dell Ireland’s enterprise marketing manager said storage technology has moved on to point where “IT leaders are no longer prepared to buy into legacy proprietary systems when these systems struggle to provide the agility to support a modern enterprise”.
Echoing the words of the several industry colleagues, he said organisations “no longer have to buy at the extreme high end of the market to achieve the performance they require to meet their needs”. Added Trevaskis, “Many organisations have seen software investments disappear because their vendor has brought out a new platform and to avail of new features they must replace the hardware and the software.
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