Survey shows storage virtualisation market poised for strong growth

Drive to decouple stored data from users set to continue apace in Europe: Primary reasons for enterprise interest in storage virtualisation include cost reduction, staff resource constraints and burgeoning volumes of data

F5 Networks, Inc., a global leader in Application Delivery Networking, has released the results of a survey that shows the market for storage virtualisation is set to continue its solid growth rate in the light of substantial IT labour costs, plus concerns around reliability and performance.

KEY FINDINGS

28% of respondents in Europe had at least a Petabyte of storage in data centres (8% had an Exabyte or more).  The median figure was 51-100 Terabytes per data centre. 

Storage virtualisation in Europe is set to grow by 65% in the next two years (37% of respondents have a current solution).

The need for heterogeneous storage (80% of respondents) plus planning for file-based storage (70%) are key drivers of the decision to implement storage virtualisation in Europe.

37% of European respondents have no data centre consolidation plans even though costs and power consumption were cited as key storage-related issues.

Existing users reported high success rates when introducing storage virtualisation to their businesses; 93% of all European companies reported achieving at least one or more of the original goals set at the beginning of the project (e.g. reduce cost / staff time associated with storage).

"This study confirms what our customers and partners are experiencing on the street," said Nigel Burmeister, Director of Product Marketing at F5. "IT managers have moved beyond early exploration, and are now achieving real benefits from mainstream storage virtualisation projects."

"We continue to see enterprise storage requirements grow at a remarkable rate, particularly for file-based, unstructured data," said Steve Bishop, CTO at VeriStor Systems. "As a solutions provider specialising in advanced data storage and virtualisation architectures, VeriStor is constantly seeking ways to help customers reduce storage costs, improve resource utilisation, and simplify storage administration. Technologies such as F5's Intelligent File Virtualisation are key to enabling those types of solutions."
 
The survey of 324 medium and large enterprise IT staff in the United States and Europe was conducted in February 2008.  Responding companies included 211 from the United States, 68 from the UK, 16 from Germany and 29 from other European countries.  The survey has a confidence level of 95 percent with an interval of +/- 5 percent.