The growing demand for Big Data technology and services would boost the demand for storage, which is anticipated to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% through 2016 and reach $6bn, according to a new report.

IDC’s new survey on storage infrastructure for Big Data and analytics (BD&A) revealed that the amount of data generated, processed, and stored by most organisations will continue to grow at rapid pace during the forecast period.

IDC Storage Systems research director Ashish Nadkarni said storage will be one of the biggest areas of infrastructure spending for Big Data and analytics environments over the forecast period.

"Revenue from storage consumed by BD&A environments will increase from a mere $379.9 million in 2011 to nearly $6 billion in 2016," Nadkarni said.

"This growth will come largely from capacity-optimised systems (including dense enclosures), however, software-based distributed storage systems with internal disks to store post-processed data will also be embraced by some users."

In addition, the research firm predicts that businesses will continue to tap into newer data sources as they shift their analytics efforts from search to discovery, accelerating investments on Infrastructure and data organisation platforms.

About 68.6% of the survey respondents cited performance as the primary driver for selecting storage architecture, while 59.5% pointed out cost as a primary driver.

Nearly, 31% of respondents had not yet deployed enterprise storage systems for data analytics infrastructure, while intended to do it in the following six months.

Analysis of operations-associated information was pointed out by 63.7% of respondents as the major factor for deploying data analytics infrastructure, while 53.3% of respondents indicated analysis of transactional data from sales or point-of-sale systems.

According to 61% of respondents, enhancing customer satisfaction is the major business challenge to be solved by deploying data analytics.