If it isn’t already, then Stephen Foskett’s Enterprise Storage Strategies blog for Nirvanix should be on your reading list. Today he has an interesting take on some statistics that have emerged on the future of NAS, as collected by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group. Analyst Terri McClure has an excellent post on the results. Here are some of the most compelling facts and predictions:
- Worldwide file archive capacity will increase from just over 10,000 petabytes in 2008 to over 62,000 petabytes in 2012—a 55% compound annual growth rate.
- The top NAS features users are looking for have to do with reducing cost in terms of power, cooling, floor space, and data footprint.
- 30% of respondents said they would not buy NAS storage without some kind of data reduction (dedupe and/or compression), and 46% would strongly prefer it.
As Stephen points out in his post, these and other findings should make you stop and think about your storage strategy. He suggests using storage resource management tools such as Microsoft’s File Server Resource Manager to ensure efficient capacity usage, as well as a data reduction tool such as the Ocarina Optimizer, along with virtualization, and migration to the cloud–using a product such as Nirvanix’s CloudNAS–for less-used data. All great suggestions, we think.
Wikibon’s Dave Vellante has a slightly different take on the growth picture, as he alerted me on Twitter. In essence, he is saying that taking into account disk cost reductions, spending won’t increase at the same rates as many analysts have predicted. However, the point still stands that power, cooling and other space considerations aren’t going anywhere. Not only that, but with a solution such as Ocarina, using data reduction actually means taking advantage of Moore’s Law and riding down the cost of disk.
All in all a worthwhile subject to look at and better understand if you are seeking to map out your storage budget. And if you are on Twitter, I recommend you follow all three of these folks: Stephen Foskett, Dave Vellante, and Terri McClure.
Thanks for consolidating this conversation Sunshine– great work. I’d like to weigh in with a couple of clarifying comments. Specifically: 1) My personal opinion is that Terri’s/ESG’s NAS growth rates of 55% are actually conservative. As I pointed out, at 55%, if my math is correct, spending will be flat to down at these rates– and I don’t think IT managers should assume flat spending on file-based storage going forward; 2) I agree, customers shouldn’t buy storage that isn’t optimized; however… 3) As wonderful as data reduction technologies are, to Foskett’s point, storage management tools & strategies should be top priorities for clients. This should include classifying data and getting rid of stuff that shouldn’t be on disk.
Which brings me back to the numbers. If this happens I could see growth of 70%+ as study after study shows a well-managed environment actually grows faster than one that’s poorly managed.
That’s an interesting perspective, Dave! I would say that you’re probably right that data growth could well be even greater than some are saying. Not sure about the distinction bt. a well-managed and poorly-managed environment. What studies are you citing here?