Storage virtualisation gaining in popularity, says IDC

Storage efficiency techniques such as virtualisation are gaining in popularity says analysts, with IT managers looking to save money on datacentre operation costs.

A study by analyst house IDC shows that demand for increased storage capacity to deal with growing masses of data are having to be balanced with economic considerations.

The result of this conflict has been interest in more effective techniques to increase capacity utilisation.

As part to the IDC report, The Economic Benefit of Storage Efficiency Technologies, 500 storage end users were surveyed to analyse plans to deploy storage efficiency techniques.

These technologies included thin provisioning, storage virtualization, storage tiering, data compression, data deduplication, and thin replication.

The report found that data compression and storage virtualisation were two of the most adopted storage efficiency technologies, while most end users surveyed were keen on data deduplication as their next efficiency move.

One of the main findings of the report was that end users are showing lower expectations for savings in storage spending and storage capacity than what is already being achieved by some users currently.  IDC says that this means expectations for future benefits among organisations are likely to be short of what is actually possible.

According to IDC, the popularity of storage efficiency techniques such as virtualisation have had an impact of storage hardware shipments however.

“IDC’s research shows that the increased use of storage efficiency technologies is one of the major contributing factors in the slowdown of storage capacity shipments over the past 12 months,” aid Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems at IDC.

“As awareness of these technologies increases, storage vendors should be ready to deliver a variety of technologies to the whole spectrum of customers, from large businesses all the way down to small companies.”

In a separate report released by the IDC, the analyst house revealed Ethernet switch revenues saw strong growth during the second quarter, hitting $5.5 billion according to an IDC report.

The figure for EMEA was a growth in revenues of 5.2 percent, which IDC claimed was a “surprisingly strong performance” given the spending situation in Europe.  Even networking king Cisco has lamented the lack of spending in the region recently.

“Building on the momentum from the previous quarter, the positive 2Q12 performance in the Ethernet switch market shows that the network continues to play a pivotal role in IT infrastructure rollouts,” said Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC.

“10GbE along with the emerging 40GbE Ethernet switch segments are leading the market to higher levels, clearly proving the point that growth in applications, virtualization, and mobility has to be looked at in conjunction with the underlying wired infrastructure in datacenters and campus deployments.”