Taking into account those market shifts and mixed fortunes for storage vendors old and new, within the current marketplace where is money being spent among businesses interested in improving, expanding or redesigning their storage options? Virtual options? A mixture of those and traditional solutions or entirely different avenues altogether? For Kelly, the trend that has been clear with clients is a continued enthusiasm to spend funds on enhancing their storage area network (SAN) capability. “This may be for additional, potentially tiered, storage but we are also seeing investment in disaster recovery capabilities such as synchronous replication,” he said.
“There is,” he added, “a clear emerging interest in converged data centre appliances from vendors such Nutanix and Oracle,” adding that he is seeing investment in more software-based solutions such as de-duping and email archiving at present too.
Strategic investment
Back to Gartner, Landers said storage technologies that have accelerated greatly in enterprise adoption in the past year include “solid-state arrays, enterprise file synchronisation and sharing (EFSS), and hyper-converged systems.”
While Venkatraman made the point that businesses in Europe are becoming “very strategic with their storage investment,” picking flash systems for running applications requiring very high performance and using new technologies such as hyper-converged for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or “even general purpose workloads.”
One reason why storage purchases are evolving is that they are becoming “more aligned with application and workload considerations,” she said. While at the same time “line-of-business managers are increasingly getting involved in storage purchases.” In turn, she said, they are emphasising “simplicity, manageability, availability and reliability and costs more than ever before when buying storage technologies.”
Venkatraman added too that in terms of storage software spend; data protection and recovery, storage management and security are “top priorities” for European enterprise IT. “Ensuring data retention and compliance, reducing storage costs, improving storage capacity, and enhancing disaster recovery plans are the most pressing storage requirements currently,” she said.
Greater choices
With a changing landscape already evident, where will 2016 and beyond bring the storage space? PwC’s Kelly felt the presiding theme for 2016 will be that spend will “continue to be aligned with the trends that are already in play, hyper-convergence, software-defined storage and so on.” Additionally, he said, he and his colleagues expect that flash and SSD technology will continue to mature so that the technology will be cost competitive with traditional storage.
The trend with clients is a continued enthusiasm to spend funds on enhancing SAN capability. This may be for additional, potentially tiered, storage but we are also seeing investment in disaster recovery capabilities such as synchronous replication, David Kelly, PwC Technology Consulting
On a similar note to Kelly, Landers said that first and foremost 2016 will see several current trends continue to develop. Those mentioned by the Gartner research director included greater availability of software defined storage products and increased enterprise interest in them.
“By 2019,” Landers said, “70% of existing storage products also will be available as ‘software only’ versions. Similarly, enterprises will have a greater number of choices to purchase from in the storage industry with greater leverage will exercise that ability.”
Continuing with the statistics, he told TechPro that come 2017, 20% of enterprise storage purchases will come through “new vendors or new kinds of vendor-client dynamics”. In addition, data storage will increasingly reside outside of the enterprise data centre, and in the cloud, he said. Landers added that Gartner believes that by year-end 2016, 60% of global companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud, up from less than 20% in 2014.
Consolidation and deconsolidation
IDC and Venkatraman meanwhile expect storage infrastructure within businesses to become more heterogeneous, representing a mix of technologies and vendors. “Enterprises are realising that no one size fits all their storage requirements and are evaluating technologies on a use-case by use-case basis and this will continue into the next year to have flash for performance-intensive workloads, object storage for scale out requirements, SDS for data management et cetera.”
Expect new technologies to mature further she said as well as storage providers to “introduce new features [and] additional capabilities to differentiate and win customers in a crowded storage marketplace.” Continuing, Venkatraman said innovation in storage will come from server vendors (nameing Microsoft and VMware), open source providers (such as RedHat or OpenStack), pure-play information management vendors such as Veritas, Veeam, Commvault as well as relative newcomers like Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Kaminario, Nexenta and Nutanix.
She spoke also of the inevitable impact that more and more industry consolidation and deconsolidation will be bring about as providers try “to make themselves relevant in the new digital age.” Taking some of the high profile names who have experienced slumps in the traditional market, Venkatraman added finally, “the mega vendor Dell-EMC would work through the merger to rationalise its product portfolio to unveil its refreshed storage solutions and align it to users’ needs as would HP Enterprise following the de-merger.”
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