Saturday 14 May 2011

Guess Who’s Back, Back Again? … External Storage Fights the Hard Fight

It’s official.  According to Gartner, external controller-based disk storage has recovered from the global recession, exceeding the record sales figure from 2008 with revenue in 2010 of more than $19.4 billion (US).  Analyst Roger Cox commented that “enterprises and service providers alike are investing more in external storage as they virtualize servers and build cloud-based services.”

Here’s my prediction: the storage required to support the Clouds will remain too expensive until Clouds move to a hardware independent software-based storage virtualization model.

As with virtual desktops, potential private cloud customers are experiencing “sticker shock” due to demanding storage requirements.  This has slowed commercial interest.  Clouds by definition are software constructs that provide services as needed when needed.  To do so, the combination of virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networks working together as a combined virtualization layer is the obvious choice.
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