Digital Lifescapes

The exponential growth of data within the typical enterprise presents a huge challenge for CIOs that must seek new ways to fund and deploy comprehensive storage solutions. Enterprise IT organizations are embracing a range of Flash-optimized architectures as they continue to transform their storage infrastructures, according to the latest market study by 451 Research. Overall, almost 90 percent of these organizations now have some form of Flash-based storage installed in their data centers, while "all Flash" approaches are becoming increasingly standard to support transactional applications. Meanwhile, more enterprise IT leaders are assessing the merits of creating an optimal hybrid storage solution, where object storage platforms are deployed for warm or cold data in active archive applications. These lower-cost solutions can free-up IT budget that was otherwise allocated for legacy SAN and NAS upgrades. Quest for Unified Storage Transformation "Organizations of ...

The market for computer server disk storage systems has had its ups and downs. The current downward trend is partly due to the effective use of virtualization software and the adoption of public cloud computing services -- whereby, the resulting IT operational efficiency has the effect of reducing hardware demand. Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues fell -5.2% year over year to $5.6 billion during the first quarter of 2014 (1Q14), according to the latest global market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). For the quarter, the total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.3 billion in revenue, representing a decrease of -6.9 percent from the prior year's first quarter and a sequential decline of -17 percent compared to the seasonally stronger 4Q13. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped was 9.9 exabytes, growing just 19.9 percent year over year. "The poor results of the first quarter were driven by several fac...