My Figure shows a forecast for raw storage revenues and capacity between 2005 and 2020. Although capacity doesn’t always grow on a quarterly, or even annual basis (see 2011 and 2012), it continuously outperforms the financial results of its manufacturers. The increasing standardisation of interconnections and ready availability of storage management software from specialist vendors mean that most users no longer need to spend over the odds for storage systems from established players. In 2018 the huge differences in price between integrated offerings from Dell EMC, IBM, NetApp and other major vendors and the more ‘do it yourself’ solutions using commodity raw storage and clever software will widen even further. Large customers will still need help in balancing and managing their block, file and object storage and in improving their data governance to meet the requirements of data protection legislation and the onslaughts of internal and external cyber criminals.
My eighth prediction is that the increasing commoditisation of the storage business will create even more vendor consolidation and turmoil in 2018. While the challenges of new unstructured data sources and Web app development will keep users focused on learning and mastering new storage techniques, increasing numbers of them will avoid paying large sums of money for handholding by the leading storage systems vendors.
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