2012 Predictions: Storage

In the run up to Christmas, we will be giving you our summation of the trends, technologies and market drivers that the channel should be considering as they plan for what will be an undoubtedly a tough year. First up is Storage with Networking, Security and Enterprise software predictions waiting in the wings.

More data but less people

Although 2011 has been a year of stagnant growth for the UK and much of western European economies, data has still been growing at an almost frightening rate. Analyst firm IDC and storage giant EMC believe the  world’s information is doubling every two years. In 2011 the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes. By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information, and 75 times the number of “information containers”.

As we potentiality head in to a possible “double dip recession”,  the number of staff that are required to manage this huge data volume is stagnant. The same experts believe that the number of IT staff to manage these zettabytes of data will grow by less than 1.5 times.  The expectation is that new “information taming” technologies such as deduplication, compression, and analysis tools are driving down the cost of creating, capturing, managing, and storing information. Based on these new technologies, the costs of managing data is now just  one-sixth the cost in comparison to 2005. As organisations look to IT to deliver costs savings, data storage and management will continue to be a major area of channel focus.

Bigger data means more regulations

But growing data comes at a price higher just infrastructure costs. “Businesses realise that their real problem is application sprawl: they have lots of data generated by thousands of different applications and they need a way of bringing that all back together to turn it into useful information that can work for the business,” explains Steve Ball, vice president and general manager for Hitachi Data Systems UK, Ireland and South Africa.

In his view, the problem of “small data” could rise as organisations struggle  to analyse and manage lots and lots of small data than one big data set. This offers the channel a way to innovate and deliver new services.

Ball believes that forthcoming regulation, such as the EU’s reform of the Data Protection Directive, will drive data management and compliance higher up the agenda. “Businesses will look for infrastructures that enable cost effective implementation of data management policies,” he adds noting that the sidebar of data moving into the cloud and across national borders will be a thorny issue that will need expertise, potentially from specialist partners, to successfully navigate.

Don't forget about the little guy

2011 had a lot of activity in the SMB storage space with notables such as Buffalo, NetGear and Iomega moving up into the “almost” midmarket. Meanwhile, the bigger fish like NetApp pushed down into the entry level. Still a nebulous market described by Buffalo’s Paul Hudson as “medium-sized SMBs “, the characteristics are typically lots of capacity, less raw performance but combined with a few enterprise class features such as low cost replication and policy-based management.

Overland is another vendor riding this trend for 2012 that will see a push for the more discerning SMB.  As  Andy Walsky, Overland's VP  for EMEA articulates: “When it comes to storage, it’s important to understand that just because SMB customers are smaller doesn’t mean they are happy to settle for less. In fact, SMB customers are keen to ‘have their cake and eat it too’ with affordable storage products that also include enterprise class features.”

The demanding SMB is still driven by the channel and NetApp’s recent move to lower RRP to make headline price comparison much more transparent is likely to spread to other vendors over the net year. 

The SMB is also likely to adopt cloud but not necessarily as an all or nothing deal. “Cloud strategies are evolving rapidly and we'll see a more hybrid approach being adopted that tightly integrates public and private cloud architectures with modern on-premise storage systems,” is the view of Marcus Thompson, senior director of EMEA sales at Drobo. “The cloud is going to have one foot on the ground for some time to come. Resellers that can offer their customers the full package will be onto a winner.”