Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

META GROUP: STORAGE MGMT MKT DYNAMIC, VOLATILE

The storage industry continues to evolve, with hardware systems maturing and software systems reaching adolescence, according to META Group Inc, a provider of information technology research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. During the past year, most technological advances have been largely incremental in nature.

Several software vendors now claim heterogeneous management capabilities, though actual functionality is often quite limited. Similarly, vendors are lining up behind the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), with many claiming "compatibility."

"SMI-S support is good news for storage users in the long term, but META Group does not expect robust SMI-S implementations before 2006-07," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president of META Group's Infrastructure Strategies advisory service. "Heterogeneous functionality will be delivered in relatively small increments during the intervening time."

Storage demand has risen steadily during the past 12 to 18 months. META Group finds net annual gigabyte storage growth will average 25 to 30 percent for enterprise (monolithic), 45 to 50 percent for midrange (modular) and 80 to 85 percent for capacity-based (SATA/ATA). Like-for-like price/capacity will improve 35 percent per year.

Through 2007, storage hardware will be rendered a tiered commodity by software-based information life-cycle functionality (e.g., adaptive storage resource management, data protection/recoverability, data movement, interoperability), which will become the primary enterprise storage differentiator.

"The good news is that IT organizations can select storage systems from robust competitive offerings, pursuing either a consolidated vendor approach to reduce storage management complexity or a 'best in class' approach to optimize the efficiency of each technology area," said Greiner.