56% Cos Have No Big Data Plans Even Beyond 2013: Study

TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, released its latest storage study, indicating slower budget growth than previous years. Covering the first half of 2012, TheInfoPro Storage Study, identifies key initiatives to maximise resources including market factors and major players. This periodic study is based on extensive interviews with storage professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe.

“After excellent growth in the last two years, storage budgets will grow more slowly in 2012 despite expanding capacity,” said Marco Coulter, TheInfoPro’s Research Director of Storage. “While focused on optimising storage capacity and supporting server virtualisation, some storage architects are concurrently preparing to deliver cloud-like provisioning.”

Coulter said key trends from the TheInfoPro Storage Study include:

• Storage budget growth slows compared to 2011 as 6 percent fewer respondents identify as having increasing budgets in 2012. Midsize enterprises (MSE) see the most belt-tightening with only 36 percent planning to increase spending, down from 47 percent.

• Networked capacity in large enterprises (LE) will grow a projected 26 percent this year. Drive choices are changing and Fibre Channel drives lost predominance in 2011 purchases.

• Automated tiering displaces backup data reduction/deduplication as the hottest technology in storage on TheInfoPro’s proprietary Technology Heat Index. Implementation of other optimisation technologies is anticipated to grow including data reduction/deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning.

• Hybrid arrays, using solid-state alongside rotating disks in arrays, approaches majority use in enterprise datacentres, while new players abound for solid-state arrays and in server-installed. Solid state vendors selected as exciting include: Fusion-io, Pure Storage, Nimbus Data, Nimble Storage, Gridiron Sys, Kove.

• Server virtualisation is the leading driver of capacity growth remaining a predominantly FC SAN destination. 67 percent of respondents have 80-100 percent of production servers connected to FC SAN.

• 56 percent of respondents have no plans for Big Data even beyond 2013.

• FC storage networks are predominant with 84 percent of respondents. As port counts increase Cisco is appearing in more datacentres.