As the volume of digital data that needs to be stored is growing, it is prompting companies to increase their capex on additional storage capacity and operating expenses associated with management of this capacity, according to a report by IDC.
The report found, budgetary constraints standing before oganisations’ ability to allocate funds for additional storage capacity, leading companies to adopt various technologies to help them utilise existing storage resources and optimise the amount of data that needs to be stored.
The study analyses the results of a US based survey of 500 storage end users that currently deploy or plan to deploy storage and/or data efficiency technologies in their datacentres as well as the benefits these users were able to gain as a result of implementing these technologies.
Technologies covered by the study include thin provisioning, storage virtualisation, storage tiering, data compression, data deduplication, and thin replication.
Results of the study showed that adoption of storage and data efficiency technologies typically comes in stages, starting with data compression and deduplication, followed by storage virtualisation and tiering, and then by thin provisioning and replication.
End users’ savings expectations in storage spending and storage capacity as a result of implementing storage and data efficiency technologies are lower than what current users were able to recognise in the past 12 months, which suggests that future benefits might be underestimated.
The study identified data compression and storage virtualisation as the two most adopted storage efficiency technologies while data deduplication was named as the most desirable storage efficiency technology for implementation in the near future.
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IT organisations will continue to face pressures influencing the ongoing adoption of storage efficiency technologies. This pressure comes from an increased share of storage spending in the overall IT budget as well as an annual growth in data ranging from 40-60%.
IDC research director of storage systems Natalya Yezhkova said that technologies that help increase utilisation of existing and new storage assets are widely welcomed by end users.
"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," Yezhkova said.
"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."
