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Februar y 2012
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State of Storage 2012

Data center storage shows all the signs of a maturing discipline:
IT professionals are more concerned about data reliability,
security and performance versus just keeping up with capacity
demands. Although centralization has been the mantra for
several years, distributed, scale-out systems are challenging the
hegemony of big storage iron. And with solid state reaching new
levels of affordability, its rapidly displacing mechanical disk for
many Tier 1 applications. In short, its an interesting time to be
in the storage business.
By Kurt Marko
Report ID: R4190212
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CONTENTS
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Authors Bio
Executive Summary
Research Synopsis
Storage 2012: Size Isnt All That Matters
A Challenge to Traditional Architectures
New Terms for an Old Concept
Storage, Network Consolidation Soars
More Important Than Ever
Storage Automation Pays Off
Cloud an Archive Option?
Solid State: From Storage Device to Storage
System
Solid State 101
Scale-Out Storage: DAS Meets the Cloud
Vendor Rundown: EMC Still Leads, but Dont
Forget IBM
Conclusions and Recommendations
Appendix
Related Reports
TABLE OF
reports.informationweek.com
Figures
6 Figure 1: Storage Under Active Management
7 Figure 2: Data Growth Rate
9 Figure 3: Technologies Used for Connectivity
10 Figure 4: Impact of FCoE and 10 Gbps

Ethernet Deployment on Fibre Channel
11 Figure 5: Dedicated Storage Team
12 Figure 6: Storage Consolidation Plans
13 Figure 7: Storage Technologies in Use
14 Figure 8: Most Important Storage
Technologies and Features
15 Figure 9: Backup Tape Encryption
16 Figure 10: Leaders in Storage
Virtualization
17 Figure 11: Primary Areas Impacting
Growth
18 Figure 12: Cloud Storage Concerns
19 Figure 13: Data Retention Period
20 Figure 14: Data Retained Up to Five Years
21 Figure 15: Use of Cloud Storage Services
22 Figure 16: Use of Solid-State Drives
23 Figure 17: Use of Vendors for Tier 1 or
Tier 2 Storage
24 Figure 18: Current or Planned Vendors
for Tier 1 or Tier 2 Storage
25 Figure 19: Leading Backup and Archiving
Vendors
26 Figure 20: Leaders in Deduplication
27 Figure 21: Storage Concerns
28 Figure 22: Planned Projects

29 Figure 23: Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity Strategy Status
30 Figure 24: Extent of Storage Technology
Use
31 Figure 25: Importance of Storage
Technologies and Features
32 Figure 26: Use of Storage Virtualization
33 Figure 27: Storage Management Tools
34 Figure 28: Storage-Related Tasks
35 Figure 29: Network Interfaces Used on
Storage Arrays
36 Figure 30: Use of Multiprotocol Arrays
37 Figure 31: File Virtualization Deployment
Plans
38 Figure 32: Scope of Involvement
39 Figure 33: Size of IT Organization
40 Figure 34: Job Title
41 Figure 35: Company Revenue
42 Figure 36: Industry
43 Figure 37: Company Size
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Kurt Marko
InformationWeek Reports
Kurt Marko is a technology writer and IT industry veteran, now focused on IT

analysis and reporting after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire
high-tech food chain, from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford
University with a BS and MS in electrical engineering, Kurt spent several years as
a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing.
He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and
simulation developer.
Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in its laser printer R&D lab doing
electrophotography research, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join the nascent technical IT group. He spent 15
years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprise-wide infrastructure projects at HP, including its Windows domain infrastructure, remote
access service, Exchange email infrastructure and managed Web services. For
the past five years, Kurt has been a frequent contributor to several IT trade and
consumer technology publications and industry conferences. He is now a regular contributor to InformationWeek and Network Computing.
2012 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited
February 2012 3
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SUMMARY
reports
EXECUTIVE
The lot of IT storage administrators has never been an easy one. End users and new
applications consume capacity almost as soon as its brought online, so were constantly
adding disk drives, storage arrays, disk volumes and network shares in a never-ending
game of catch-up. At times, it must feel like being head chef at an all-you-can-eat buffet
when the high school football team drops in for a postgame snack. Fortunately, storage
technology has advanced fast enough that keeping plates full is seldom a problemif
you can afford to buy the gear.
The good news for budgets is that our 2012 InformationWeek State of Storage survey
shows demand stabilizing. Blindly piling on disk capacity, upgrading SANs, building new
converged networks, and adding fancy data-reduction or storage virtualization technologies arent atop most respondents to-do lists. Storage administrators still worry, however,
about meeting resource requirements for mission-critical apps, and our data shows that
were more concerned than ever about data integrity, security and redundancy.
Storage pros, both our respondents and industry experts, are developing more mature,
holistic and nuanced strategies for handling todays problems. This is reflected in the
growing use of solid-state storage for high throughput needs; cloud services for backup,
archiving and disaster recovery; scale-out storage architectures for cost-effective, highly
resilient capacity growth; and data encryption to protect information both on premises
and off.
Well highlight promising new technologies that arent yet on most respondents radar
and offer some advice as you plan your 2012 storage strategy.
February 2012 4
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InformationWeek Reports
analysts arm business technology decision-makers with realworld perspective based on
qualitative and quantitative
research, business and technology assessment and planning
tools, and adoption best practices gleaned from experience.
To contact us, write to managing director Art Wittmann
at awittmann@techweb.com,
content director
Lorna Garey
at lgarey@techweb.com,
editor-at-large Andrew
Conry-Murray
at acmurray@techweb.com, and
research managing editor
Heather Vallis at
hvallis@techweb.com.
Find all of our reports at
SYNOPSIS
ABOUT US
reports
RESEARCH
Survey Name InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey

Survey Date January 2012
Region North America
Number of Respondents 313
Purpose To determine the state of enterprise storage infrastructures
Methodology InformationWeek surveyed business technology decision-makers at
North American companies. The survey was conducted online, and respondents were
recruited via an email invitation containing an embedded link to the survey. The email
invitation was sent to qualified InformationWeek subscribers.
February 2012 5
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Storage 2012: Size Isnt All That Matters

Finally, were seeing concrete signs of an
improving economy and business climate. For
IT, nowhere are these positive signals stronger
than in the storage market. Despite some natural disasters that had profound effects on the
component supply chain, 2011 proved to be
a year of robust growth in the storage business. IDCs most recent Worldwide Quarterly
Disk Storage Systems Tracker found that, in
the third quarter of 2011, revenue for vendors
of these systems posted year-over-year gains
of 10.8%, to just under $5.8 billion, while capacity of total shipped systems reached 5,429
petabytesup 30.7% year over year. Two of
the largest pure-play storage vendors, EMC
and NetApp, saw revenue growth in the 15%
to 20% range last year. On Wall Street, shares
of drive manufacturer Seagate jumped more
than 40%.
The 2012 edition of our annual InformationWeek State of Storage Survey shows how much
stock IT places in various storage technologies
and vendors. More than 300 business technolreports.informationweek.com
ogy professionals whose jobs involve managing, operating or buying storage systems and
services took part and told us what theyre doing to cope with increasing demand, what stor-
age features and technologies they most value,

and what keeps them up at night. In this report,
we trend their responses to gauge how the
market has changed in the past year and pro-
Figure 1
Storage Under Active Management

Approximately how much storage do you have under active management?
2012
2011
Less than 1 TB
11%
10%
Between 1 TB and 99.9 TB
57%
59%
Between 100 TB and 499.9 TB
14%
15%
Between 500 TB and 1 PB
9%
7%
More than 1 PB
9%
9%
Base: 313 respondents in January 2012 and 377 in November 2010
Data: InformationWeek State of Storage Survey of business technology professionals
R4190212/2
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file their plans for the coming months. Well

also highlight up-and-coming technologies to
watch and talk with some innovators who are
betting their companies on products that
could well drive IT storage strategies and buying decisions in 2012 and well beyond.
In the storage business, the story line always
seems to be about out-of-control use and accelerating capacity demands. However, this
years survey shows signs that the capacity
curve is shifting from an exponential and
chaotic trajectory to one of steady but manageably linear growth. Among our 313 respondents, the statistical distribution of capacity
under active management this year is almost
identical to last, with more than two-thirds operating less than 100 TB and only 18% running
more than 500 TB. To put this in perspective,
Nexsan offers a 60-disk system that maxes out
at 180 TB of raw capacity in 4U.
The data also shows that the growth of all
managed storage has slowed ever so slightly,
with most reporting rates of less than 24%
and, like last year, a scant 7% reporting hypergrowth of more than 50% annually. Still, the
Figure 2
Data Growth Rate

What is the growth rate for the overall data you have to store and manage?
2012
2011
Less than 10% a year
23%
19%
10% to 24% a year
53%
52%
25% to 49% a year
17%
22%
50% to 74% a year
4%
4%
75% to 100% a year
1%
2%
Greater than 100% a year
2%
1%
change is so small that until confirmed with

further data, storage managers shouldnt pop
the corks just yet. Continue planning on significant growth.
R4190212/3
A Challenge to Traditional Architectures

With commodity SATA drives now topping
out at 3 TB and high-performance SFF (2.5inch) disks in the 300-to-900-GB range, adding
February 2012 7
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Related Report: SAN RFI

Storage and networking are
ground zero for the next enterprise data center upgrade wave.
This time, architecture designs will
be based on virtualization and private clouds, not discrete servers
and local disks. Translation: Plenty
of IT teams are in the market for
SANs. Heres how to make vendors work for your business.
Download
reports
capacity, while still not a trivial matter, is less

of a challenge. Improvements in both magnetic disk and semiconductor flash densities,
which in the latter case have resulted in dramatic reductions in the price per bit of solidstate memory, mean that were entering an
era in which performancespecifically, I/O
throughputis more important than capacity when thinking about a storage infrastructure strategy and hardware implementation.
Notwithstanding price spikes resulting from
temporary supply disruptions, such as Thailands floods, hard disk capacity has gotten so
cheap that the biggest return on a storage investment comes by boosting application performance. In storage, this means increasing
I/O throughput and decreasing latency.
While the dropping price and increasing capacity of solid-state disks (SSDs) is a major
driver of this change in emphasis, its by no
means the only one. The pervasive use of virtualized servers improves resource utilization,
but at a cost, since many applications share a
single systems network and storage interfaces. For IT, that means you need not be run-
SCALE OUT VS. SCALE UP
New Terms for an Old Concept
here have always been two design

approaches for adding resources or
capacity to an IT system, whether its
a computer, network or storage: scaling
horizontally, by adding nodes, or scaling
ver tically, by augmenting internal resources. In the world of storage architectures, these are known as scale out vs. scale
up. Scale-up systems are still the most common in large enterprises, as witnessed by
EMCs success building extremely large
storage frames like the Symmetrix line, and
have grown apace with the rise of server
virtualization and the attendant consolida-
ning a high-end transaction processing application to tax the throughput of mechanical

drives; 10 or 20 SharePoint servers or Web
apps might create the same number of IOPS
(I/O operations per second). Its what Erik Eyberg, senior analyst at Texas Memory Systems
tion of compute and storage workloads.

Scale-out storage systems work differently.
Instead of adding more disks and controllers
to a single array, these designs can increase
capacity simply by adding more nodes to a
networked cluster. These storage bricks are
virtually consolidated via the systems management software, presenting a unified view
of the total storage pool that can be parceled
and allocated as if it were a single array. Early
scale-out designs only supported file storage,
acting as a distributed NAS array; however,
several now also support block access using
SAN protocols (usually iSCSI). Kurt Marko
(TMS), calls the I/O blender problem. Transforming what was once sequential I/O into
random reads and writes is a metamorphosis
that Eyberg says concentrates system I/O at
higher sustained levels. This further exposes
bottlenecks in disk-based systems that, beFebruary 2012 8
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cause of the mechanical nature of spinning

platters and moving actuator arms, slow significantly when responding to random data.
Its clear that just replacing a mechanical disk
with an SSD while sticking with the same controller-based storage array design is far from
an optimal use of the inherent speed of semiconductors. Jonathan Goldick, CTO of Violin
Memory Systems, says the problem with hybrid designsthink trays of SSDs commingled
with HDDsis that the controller architecture
is designed for spinning
disks. Ten SSDs will satThe data shows that the growth of
urate any controller,
all managed storage has slowed
Goldick says.
Thus, buoyed by the
ever so slightly, with most
success of solid-state
reporting rates of less than 24%.
specialist Fusion-io,
which increased revenue more than fivefold in the past year, 2011
saw increased interest in specialty, purposebuilt solid-state storage systems from both
old hands like TMS and up-and-comers like
Kaminario, Virident and Violin.
Hypervirtualization and its evolutionary offreports.informationweek.com
Figure 3
Technologies Used for Connectivity

What percentage of your storage uses the following access technologies for connectivity?
None
1-9%
10-24%
25-49%
50-74%
75-99%
100%
Direct attached storage
8%
29%
23%
17%
8%
7%
8%
Network file system (NFS/CIFS)
16%
17%
22%
16%
14%
9%
6%
Fibre Channel/SAN
31%
8%
12%
11%
17%
18%
3%
iSCSI/SAN
44%
17%
17%
9%
10%
3%
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)/SAN
62%
14%
Data: InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey of 313 business technology professionals, January 2012
spring, internal private clouds, are not the only

R
factors
in sustained storage workloads. Were
also seeing fun new network phenomena.
Think VDI boot storms on Monday morning
when everyone powers up virtual desktops,
app spikes like those on Cyber Monday when
e-commerce sites get hammered or the end
of the month when financial and HR systems
overload, and server-to-server traffic as virtual
workloads get shuffled between physical sys-
10%
6%
5% 3%
R4190212/7
tems. All add stress to centralized storage systems and their networks.
Collectively, the move to cloud-like, distributed, virtualized server farms is creating
cracks in the supremacy of consolidated storage systems within large enterprises. For
some teams, its spawning so-called scaleout storage architectures that transparently
integrate distributed storage arrays and file
systems under central management and proFebruary 2012 9
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visioning umbrella. Some vendors, like Nutanix and Pivot3, encourage IT to go even further by ditching the notion of separate storage appliances entirely and reuniting virtual
compute and storage resources on the same
device.
Yet as well see, these arent just standalone
servers under a new banner.
Some of these trends are still unfolding. Others, like the mainstreaming of 10 Gbps Ethernet, data and storage network consolidation,
and increased concern over data loss and security, are here now.
Figure 4
Storage, Network Consolidation Soars

Direct-attached storage remains the most
broadly deployed means of connectivity. Fully
92% of respondents still have some DAS systems hanging around, and 23% use DAS for
half or more of their storage needs, virtually
unchanged from last year. Fibre Channel remains the most pervasive connection technology, however, with 38% of respondents
putting more than half of their storage capacity on FC, up two points from 2011.
Pundit predictions of the death of Fibre

Channel over Ethernet are much exaggerated:
R
Our survey finds 38% of respondents have
now deployed this convergence technology,
up 10 points in the past year, with an intrepid
8% using FCoE for half or more of their storage needs. Although iSCSI is still a more popular converged network choice, its use actually declined in the past year, while NAS
remains the most common Ethernet-based
storage technology, with nearly 30% of re-
Impact of FCoE and 10 Gbps Ethernet Deployment on Fibre Channel

Has your deployment of FCoE and 10 Gbps Ethernet allowed you to eliminate Fibre Channel from your environment?
2012
2010
Yes
8%
10%
Not yet, but thats the plan
63%
46%
No, we still need FC
29%
44%
Base: 110 respondents in October 2011 and 116 in August 2010 at organizations with FCoE or 10 Gbps Ethernet deployed
in production
Data: InformationWeek Data Center Convergence Survey of business technology professionals
R3701111/7
spondents using network-attached devices

for more than half of their storage needs.
Despite the continued growth of FCoE and
the seeming inevitability of Ethernet becoming dominant in storage networks, theres no
sign FCoE is ready to fully replace native FC
SANs. Our InformationWeek Data Center Convergence Survey found that a mere 8% of
FCoE users have managed to fully eliminate
native Fibre Channel, although for an additional 63%, thats the plan. Just 29% expect to
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need any native FC in the long term. Despite

what its boosters say, long term, Fibre Channels prognosis is grim. However, since the
turnover in storage networking equipment is
relatively slow, we believe itll be a factor for
at least five years, at which point well have 40
Gbps or 100 Gbps Ethernet to the edge.
While inertia explains why DAS systems are
still common, particularly among smaller enterprises, their days are numbered, at least
terms of the traditional JBOD or standalone
RAID. Most respondents have either already
consolidated to centrally managed storage
systems or expect to do soalthough for
many, those plans are still vague. We expect
the share of DAS to drop as distributed, cloudlike file systems or scale-out architectures
catch on.
Scale-out storage appliances, some with
embedded hypervisors, also represent a
threat to big, centralized, high-profit-margin
arrays from players like EMC, Hewlett-Packard,
IBM and NetApp. Yet these new distributed, direct-attached systems bear little resemblance
to the old standalone server with a RAID
Figure 5
Dedicated Storage Team

Do you have a dedicated storage management and administration team?
Yes
31%
41%
No, but we have one or more staffers

whose prime responsibility is storage
28%
No
model. Central management software and

R
features
like storage virtualization and automated load balancing make an assortment of
disks and solid-state storage look like a single
resource pool.
Thats a good thing, too, since the last thing
IT departments need is more management
complexity, no matter where it resides. One-
R4190212/24
quarter of our respondents cite insufficient

tools for storage management as a top concern, which is understandable since only 31%
have dedicated storage management teams.
More Important Than Ever
When it comes to the storage technologies
most used and valued by our respondents, reFebruary 2012 11
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FAST FACT
74%
have consolidated storage
or are planning to do so.
reports
liability and security trump bleeding-edge

features. But ITs not standing stillwe asked
which new storage technologies respondents
have deployed and saw a general increase
across the board. This is a natural reflection of
market (and buyer) maturation; however, a
couple of items that spiked in the past year indicate that data availability and protection are
more important than ever.
Sixty-seven percent of our respondents use
data replication, up 10 points in a year. Other
data-preservation technologies, such as diskto-disk backup and snapshots, also rank near
the top of our list of 15 storage technologies
currently deployed. Another noteworthy jump
occurred in the share of those using data encryption, now 55%, up eight points in the past
year. Similarly, when we asked about use of
backup tape encryption (yes, 43% of respondents still widely use tape) the numbers were
up again this year. Fifty percent encrypt some
or all of their tapes, while the portion of those
with no plans to encrypt dropped nine points.
These results arent flukes, either. When we
asked respondents to rate those technolo-
Figure 6
Storage Consolidation Plans

Have you consolidated, or are you planning to consolidate, storage into fewer, centrally managed systems?
Yes, weve already consolidated
25%
Yes, were planning to do

so in the next 12 months
18%
9%
Dont know
17%
31%
Yes, but theres no specific timeframe
No
gies they consider most important when

R
evaluating new purchases, once again, data
replication and encryption came out on top,
both cited by more respondents than a year
ago and confirming that data protection is
top of mind.
As for deduplication and data compression,
while theyre used in production by 45% and
R4190212/25
52% of respondents, respectively, fewer than

one-third consider these important product
evaluation criteria, down from our last survey.
This is likely an indication that IT now considers these relatively mature and undifferentiated technologies that areor should be
standard features of any enterprise-class
storage system. Vendors thinking dedupe will
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storage technologies they have deployed or

consider important. But this years survey
shows the age of solid state is upon us: Between 20% and 23% of respondents, depend-
tip the competitive balance are likely to be

disappointed.
What will be a selling point? Last year, we
didnt ask readers to rank SSDs among the
Figure 7
Storage Technologies in Use

Which of the following storage technologies and features are in use at your organization?
11%
9%
Massive array of idle disks (MAID)
20%
N/A
Solid-state disks (SSDs) within servers
13%
Automated tiering
20%
23%
N/A
Solid-state disks (SSDs) on disk array
Thin provisioning
28%
27%
32%
29%
Virtual tape libraries (VTLs)
38%
34%
Storage virtualization
33%
28%
45%
Data deduplication
Data compression
Encryption
Storage-based snapshots
Disk-to-disk-to-tape backup
38%
File virtualization
52%
51%
55%
56%
55%
47%
33%
28%
62%
63%
57%
Replication
Note: Percentages reflect a response of use widely or limited production use

Data reduction (dedupe or compression) on primary (Tier 1) storage
2011
67%
2012
R4190212/9
ing on the type of system, are already using

SSDs. Although they arent yet considered a
key product evaluation criterion, this will
surely change as prices drop and performance improvements stack up, and as products
optimized for solid-state memory gain visibility. Once storage system capacity, scalability
and reliability become baseline expectations,
throughput and latency will inevitably ascend
as important product differentiators.
Storage Automation Pays Off
Were always interested to see how respondents answer the question, What storage activities do you typically spend a significant
amount of time performing? Were sure that,
eventually, at least one of the perennial top two
time sinksbackup and archiving and mundane storage system maintenancewill fall.
While this is not that year, both did tick down a
few points. Our takeaway is that automation is
finally freeing IT from some routine storage
tasks. That said, the activity trends arent all positivefor storage vendors at least. Fewer respondents are evaluating new products and
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Other aspects of enterprise storage, however, will likely never change. Call us pessimists, but capacity demand always increases, unstructured data is out of control,
technologies. Our take is that storage as a discipline is maturing and for many IT departments, the focus is moving from planning and
design to implementation and optimization.
Figure 8
Most Important Storage Technologies and Features

Which of the following storage technologies and features do you consider very important when making storage purchase decisions?
5%
6%
15%
N/A
Solid-state drives (SSDs) within servers
16%
N/A
Solid-state drives (SSDs) on disk array
17%
19%
Automated tiering
19%
15%
22%
26%
Thin provisioning
22%
21%
25%
29%
File virtualization
Data compression
31%
31%
30%
34%
39%
32%
Data deduplication
34%
36%
39%
41%
42%
33%
Encryption
Replication
Note: Percentages reflect a response of very important

2011
52%
49%
2012
R4190212/12
and were keeping stuff for longer and longer.

Although storage capacity growth rates are
down a smidgen from last year, the sources of
expansion are changingand in a way that
signals danger ahead.
While databases are still the single category
most responsible for Tier 1 capacity growth,
in aggregate, structured (databases, CAD/GIS,
R&D data) and unstructured (email, Office
documents, rich media, Web content) are
now neck-and-neck as leading growth
sources in Tier 1. At Tiers 2 and 3, however, its
no contest: Unstructured data is the culprit,
voraciously consuming every terabyte we
throw at it. Fully 77% of our respondents list
some form of unstructured data at the leading source of Tier 2 storage growth; thats up
from 70% last year. For Tier 3 the share is an
equally commanding 71%.
The growth of unstructured data in Tier 3 is
also apparent when looking at retention rates.
The top four data types retained for up to five
years, and thus likely to be spinning on disk, not
just vaulted on tape, are unstructured, with
email once again leading the pack. Noteworthy
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was an eight-point jump from last year in those

holding Web content for five years. Structured
databases are the data sets still most likely to
be held more than five years, but No. 2, at 53%,
are Office and SharePoint documents.
We did see one small but encouraging sign
of growing discipline in storage managementspecifically, a drop in the percentage of
respondents with no retention policies at all.
For email, the percentage of respondents in
this hall of shame dropped by three points
from last year, while we saw an impressive
nine-point drop for Web content. This indicates
that information management formalism,
which was initially confined to databases, has
spread to unstructured content in the majority
of companiesand just in time, too. If content
management is a weak point for your shop,
check out our recent report on the subject.
Cloud an Archive Option?
The fact that we have piles of unstructured
data accumulating for years and years leads
to a question: Where do we put it? For some
storage managers, the cloud is now the anreports.informationweek.com
Figure 9
Backup Tape Encryption

Do you encrypt backup tapes?
2012
2011
Yes, we encrypt them all
22%
19%
Yes, when required by regulations and/or best practices
28%
23%
No, but we plan to
9%
10%
No
34%
43%
Dont know
7%
5%
swer. David Chapa, chief technology evangelist at Quantumitself a major supplier of

both disk- and tape-based backup hardwaresees the cloud becoming a distinct
storage layer, sitting between high-capacity,
SATA-based Tier 3 systems like virtual tape li-
R4190212/20
braries and offline tape archives. Our survey

shows that IT pros may be warming to that
idea; respondents reactions to cloud storage
is gradually moving from No way, out of the
question, to Sure, under the right circumstances. To wit: The share of respondents sayFebruary 2012 15
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3%
1%
Dont know
3%
5%
Other
1%
N/A
Onaro (NetApp)
1%
2%
DataCore
1%
N/A
Coraid
1%
N/A
Exanet
3%
4%
Xiotech
3%
4%
FalconStor
5%
N/A
Oracle/Solaris
5%
N/A
HP/LeftHand Networks
6%
Symantec
Oracle
8%
6%
11%
12%
Dell/EqualLogic
12%
N/A
HP/3PAR
N/A*
Dell/Compellent
NetApp
HP
IBM
EMC
16%
21%
25%
26%
30%
30%
35%
37%
50%
48%
ing they have absolutely no plans to use cloud for email, archiving, or backup and recovery, in- categories and is summed up nicely by one respondent: Because of the cost of maintaining
storage dropped eight points this year, while creased by eight points.
the number using it in some capacity, whether
The main driver is the same as for most cloud and managing storage, I am looking more to
Figure 10
the cloud for nonessential data storage/backup.
Leaders in Storage Virtualization
Still, that protective inWhich of the following vendors do you consider leaders in storage virtualization?
stinct is at play. Road2012
2011
blocks to greater cloud
adoption remain largely
unchanged: security, reliability and performance.
That is, buyers want it
safe, sure and fast. Well
be watching to see how
cloud vendors go about
assuring IT that they can
protect data. Meanwhile,
theyre clearly getting
their cost-effectiveness
message across: The
share of respondents labeling cost a major concern dropped nine
R4190212/30
*Change in vendor name from 2011
Note: Three responses allowed
points. Since we didnt
see any major cloud storFebruary 2012 16
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4%
4%
4%
R&D data sets
4%
4%
3%
CAD and GIS
10%
9%
16%
14%
29%
30%
13%
Rich media (video, audio, imaging)
Email
Office documents and SharePoint
26%
17%
22%
22%
15%
Enterprise database and data warehouse
Solid State: From Storage

Device to Storage System
As mentioned, solid-state storage is well past the novelty phase.
Not only has it become the default
storage medium for the growing
army of mobile devices, its rapidly
displacing magnetic disks on laptops from the MacBook Air to Intels new Ultrabooks. Our survey
finds that just under half of respondents now either use SSDs to
InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey of 313 business technology
some degree in production or are Data:
professionals, January 2012
testing, either in servers or disk arrays. Yet the very term solid-state disk ob- market. SSD implies a one-for-one replaceR
scures the growing diversity of the non- ment of magnetic drives, and indeed, most
volatile, semiconductor-based storage solid-state devices are still deployed in this
way. In fact, to maintain compatibility with existing storage systems, flash memory chips are typically (and wastefully) packaged in
standard 2.5- or 3.5-inch disk trays.
Used in this way, SSDs certainly offer dramatic improvements in
speed and power consumption
over conventional disks. However,
theyre hamstrung by an architecture thats built to mitigate the limitations of a relatively slow mechanical system. The upshot is
reminiscent of the days when gearheads dropped Corvette V8 engines into Chevy Vegas. Sure, theyll
go faster, but they still wont accelerate or handle like sports cars.
As Violin CTO Goldick points out,
hybrid HDD/SDD storage architecR4190212/4
tures create performance bottlenecks because controllers are designed to cache data from slow disks, not
stream it from fast chips, and they require predictable workloads to achieve optimal per-
Web (online content; wiki, blog, collaboration)
45%
age price wars in the past year, this Figure 11

could reflect ITs growing underPrimary Areas Impacting Growth
standing of the models benefits in For each tier, which application is most responsible for growth of stored data
general and the ROI picture of in- in your organization?
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
ternally managed infrastructure
vs. usage-based, fully managed
services for some types of storage.
6%
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3%
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FAST FACT
79%
are concerned about
cloud storage security,
unchanged from last year.
reports
formance. Even if the hybrid system is 99.9%

correct [in keeping active data on SSD], the difference between that one I/O that goes to disk
is huge, he says, adding that if you benchmark
databases on a hybrid, auto-tiering system, the
reads or writes that miss the SSD dominate
overall performance results. In essence, the
SSDs on such systems resemble giant caches,
and hence performance is highly dependent
on not only the workload (something thats becoming less predictable as data centers become
more virtualized), but also the caching or tiering algorithmthe code for automatically
moving data from fast SSDs to slow HDDs.
In contrast, Violin and its competitors, including Fusion-io, Kaminario, TMS and Virident, want to completely replace Tier 1 storage with flash. I believe that in two years, you
wont see a spinning disk in a Tier 1 array,
Goldick says.
In short, hybrids are a bridge technology,
needed only because traditional array vendors cant build controllers that are flash-optimizedthat is, able to process data as fast
as flash devices can move itfast enough to
Figure 12
Cloud Storage Concerns

What are your main concerns about using cloud storage services?
2012
2011
Security
79%
79%
Reliability and availability
52%
55%
Performance
49%
51%
Cost
39%
48%
Regulatory concerns
38%
34%
Other
3%
5%
Note: Multiple responses allowed
meet demand for flash storage. Hence the hybrid approach. In the meantime, new companies without any legacy investments, like
R4190212/23
Kaminario and Violin, started from day one

with the idea they were only going to design
flash systems and thus went with a very difFebruary 2012 18
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ferent hardware design. Gareth Taube, Kaminarios VP of marketing, says his companys vision is that solid state will totally replace highperformance HDDs by 2020.
While we agree that solid state will replace
HDD in Tier 1 systems within this decade,
clearly, not everyone can jump into a pure
solid-state system. For those with huge investments in EMC/NetApp storage arrays, the hybrid approach is a form of investment protection. And youll see the big boys introduce
native solid-state products into the mix soon
enough, as EMC just did with its Project Lightening flash cards (see the story at Network
Computing for more details).
The upshot: Solid-state storage has essentially mutated into two distinct storage tiers:
SSDs vs. pure solid-state systems, a category
that includes both flash and DRAM. Quantums Chapa sees these pure solid-state systems occupying the top of an increasingly diverse storage hierarchy that also includes SSD,
high-performance HDD (SAS), high-capacity
HDD (SATA), cloud storage and tape. The challenge for storage architects will be to underreports.informationweek.com
Figure 13
Data Retention Period

What is your organizations current retention period for the following types of data?
Less than two years
Two to five years
Six to seven years
Eight to 10 years
Indefinite
No policy
Email
27%
18%
20%
7%
16%
12%
10%
14%
22%
12%
29%
13%
10%
18%
19%
8%
26%
19%
19%
14%
13%
4%
20%
30%
16%
21%
10%
3%
14%
36%
CAD and GIS
8%
10%
9%
7%
21%
45%
19%
46%
R&D data sets
9%
11%
8%
7%
stand the pros and cons of each tier and apR

propriately
map applications and data sets to
capitalize on the strengths of each.
Solid State 101
Say you want to deploy some pure solid-
R4190212/5
state storage now. Probably the most-wellknown and popular way (if Fusion-ios tripledigit sales growth is any indication) is an internal PCIe-based card loaded with flash or
DRAM. PCIe cards typically sport capacities in
the range of 300 GB to 1.4 TB, with products
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using single-level cell (SLC) devices (which deliver fast writes and better durability) on the
low end and enterprise-class multilevel cell
(MLC) chips at higher capacities. To the server
OS, these look like any other disk device, with
LUNs that can be used locally or exported on
a SAN. In fact, TMSs Eyberg points out that his
companys cardscurrently on the 17th generationare now certified to work with IBMs
SAN Volume Controller, meaning internal
solid-state volumes can be managed as part
of a larger storage pool.
Such integration with storage management
software actually highlights the biggest problem with internal cards: Theyre not easily
sharable. And thats not all; Kaminarios Taube
points out that they lack system-level redundancy and data protection. Plug-in flash
modules really go back to the direct-attach
model, he adds.
And we surely dont want to go there. So, instead of plugging flash cards into individual
servers, why not build an entire storage array
out of them?
Until recently, that would have been a prereports.informationweek.com
Figure 14
Data Retained Up to Five Years

Which of the following types of data are retained for up to five years?
2012
2011
Email
45%
40%
37%
29%
33%
32%
28%
27%
24%
23%
R&D data sets
20%
23%
CAD and GIS
18%
21%
Note: Percentages reflect retention periods of less than two years or two to five years
R4190212/6
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FAST FACT
34%
are considering cloud
storage, unchanged from
last years survey.
reports
posterously expensive proposition. Yet, its exactly what next-generation solid-state storage
products, from new (Kaminario and Violin
Memory) and not-so-new (TMS) vendors, actually do.
When TMS pioneered solid-state storage
cards, it initially used even more expensive
DRAM. Of course, about the only customers
that could afford these cards were the federal
government (think national security and nuclear weapons development) and the oil and
gas industry, which used them for things like
seismic data analysis. However, Moores Law
eventually crushes even the most stubborn
semiconductor price barriers, and Eyberg says
TMSs systems are now competitive with
high-performance 15K rpm drives. He further
contends that MLC-based arrays, at about
$12.50 per gigabyte, will soon approach the
cost of 10K disks.
The secret to this new breed of silicon storage array is that theyre designed from the
ground up to be solid-state systems. They
ditch the disk controller architecture, instead
relying on custom silicon and software to per-
Figure 15
Use of Cloud Storage Services

Do you use cloud storage services?
2012
2011
Yes, for email
13%
8%
Yes, for archiving
11%
8%
Yes, for backup and recovery
8%
6%
No, but we are considering it
34%
34%
No
43%
51%
form memory management, load balancing,

write leveling and redundancy. On the inside,
they look much like a server with banks of
memory modules. But on the outside, they expose standard storage interfacesnative Fibre Channel or Ethernet/iSCSIand disk
R4190212/22
LUNs. This solid-state-optimized design yields

truly astounding performance. Systems using
SLC flash typically exceed 1 million IOPS for
both reads and writes, while MLC-based arrays
run in the 300,000-to-500,000-IOPS range.
Another class of all-solid-state storage system
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takes a less revolutionary design approach by

substituting banks of flash modules or cards
with an array of SSDs. Products like those from
Pure Storage and WhipTail use a more traditional controller architecture that sacrifices
some throughput, typically reaching around
150,000 to 300,000 IOPS. This design is essentially just an all-solid-state variant of what the
big storage systems, like those from EMC, HP
and NetApp, do in their hybrid arrays that integrate shelves of SSDs into a larger disk-based
system. In the latter case, users have the option
of partitioning capacity into LUNs that are either purely SSD-based or a hybrid setup in
which the controllers auto-tiering software automatically moves hot data (that most recently used or frequently accessed) onto SSD
from the much larger pool of HDD.
As Violins emphasis on Tier 1 arrays implies,
solid-state storage is best suited for applications that require high throughput and low latency. Goldick says most of the companys
customers use solid state as the primary data
store for specific applications, typically databases, big data analytics and simulations. With
Figure 16
Use of Solid-State Drives

For which applications or storage requirements are you using or planning to use SSDs?
General databases
61%
Improve overall server performance
57%
Automated tiered storage
34%
Technical applications (financial, scientific)
29%
Reduce power consumption
27%
Video/multimedia editing
21%
Other transaction-heavy software (e-commerce, CRM, ERP)
26%
Other
5%
Base: 166 respondents using or evaluating SSDs
usable capacity on Violins systems maxing

out at 40 TB (MLC), these need not be Lilliputian data sets. Eybergs customer analysis is
similar. The market is exploding due to the
big data movement, he says, adding that typ-
R4190212/10
ical applications include Web-click analysis,

manufacturing planning and ERP.
Their views jibe with our survey results that
show 61% of those deploying or evaluating
SSDs use them for general databases, while
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Figure 17
Use of Vendors for Tier 1 or Tier 2 Storage

Which of the following vendors do you use, or plan to use, for Tier 1 or Tier 2 storage?
97%
94%
94%
92%
90%
81%
3U),
R discrete storage devices that can be aggregated into larger pools. Typically, a local OS
and distributed file systems are coupled with
Dot Hill
1% 2%
2% 4%
BlueArc
3% 3%
Overland
4% 4%
Nexsan
4% 6%
Spectra Logic
11% 8%
Quantum
14%
Hitachi
11%
15%
21%
Dell/Compellent
6%
21%
Sun Microsystems
22%
Dell/EqualLogic
NetApp
32%
41%
IBM
EMC
45%
14%
15%
13%
10%
75%
73%
64%
53%
46%
Dont use/plan to use
64%
Plan to use in the future
45%
38%
Currently use
7%
57% are looking to improve overall server performance, undoubtedly for those I/O-intensive tasks where mechanical disks and HDD
controllers slow the business down. However,
theres an odd disconnect between the majority using SSDs on databases, in contrast
with only 26% deploying them for transaction-heavy applications like CRM, ERP and ecommerce. One explanation might be that
most SSD adopters use them on only the
database tier of these complex, multilevel applications and not over the entire suite. Often,
thats just a matter of budget realities. For example, the entry-level TMS RamSan-810, using
enterprise MLC flash and sporting either dual
8 Gbps FC or 40 Gbps InfiniBand ports, lists at
$75,000 for 4 TB. The faster RamSan-710, identical except with 4 TB of SLC flash, goes for
$130,000. Both take up just 1U and are likely
subject to discounting.
Flash cards and SSDs are also showing up in
another not-so-new but increasingly popular
form of storage device, so-called scale-out appliances (see our discussion of scale-out systems, p. 8). These are small (typically 2U to
55%
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HP
Previous
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centralized management and control software, working with a shared set of metadata.
Initially, scale-out boxes resembled NAS appliFebruary 2012 23
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comes from using standard x86 motherboards and CPUs to host general-purpose hypervisors as well. Olivier Thierry, chief marketing officer of Pivot3, one purveyor of unified
ances that could be assembled, Lego-like, into

large virtualized storage pools; however, with
cheaper CPU horsepower, some vendors now
favor using the beefed-up processing that
Figure 18
Current or Planned Vendors for Tier 1 or Tier 2 Storage

Which of the following vendors do you use, or plan to use, for Tier 1 or Tier 2 storage?
2011

Note: Percentages reflect a response of currently use or plan to use in the future
3%
N/A
Dot Hill
6%
N/A
Overland
6%
N/A
BlueArc
N/A
Nexsan
8%
10%
N/A
Spectra Logic
N/A
Quantum
19%
25%
24%
Hitachi
Sun Microsystems
N/A*
Dell/Compellent
Dell/EqualLogic
NetApp
IBM
EMC
HP
27%
30%
36%
36%
47%
44%
47%
54%
54%
55%
59%
62%
64%
2012
compute/storage appliances, says the

epiphany came when the company realized it
already used an embedded hypervisor to run
its storage controller software. The aha moment was when we discovered we could also
run apps on the same hardware stack we
were using to run the RAID array, Thierry says.
R4190212/27
Scale-Out Storage: DAS Meets the Cloud

Scale-out storage systems arent exactly
new; remember the buzzword RAIN, or redundant array of independent nodes? Interest in
the model is reviving, however, as cloud architectures like OpenStack gain credibility as a
way to aggregate compute and storage resources from many relatively inexpensive,
commodity servers. Its akin to how big data
applications like Hadoop become proficient at
dividing and distributing work across hundreds or thousands of nodes hosting potentially petabytes of data. Scale out has traditionally been used for file storagethat is, NAS, in
which individual storage nodes collect and
share metadata with a controller that builds
and manages a global namespace. Because
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cost for the same capacity compared with big,

consolidated, scale-up arrays.
As the name suggests, scale-out designs are
also more adaptable, making it easier for IT to
each storage node is essentially an x86 server

with its own network interfaces and memory,
which also acts as cache, scale-out designs
typically offer greater performance and lower
Figure 19
Leading Backup and Archiving Vendors

Which of the following vendors do you consider leaders in backup and archiving?
2011

1%
1%
Dont know
5%
8%
Other
1%
N/A
BlueArc
2%
N/A
Overland
2%
N/A
Nexsan
4%
N/A
Spectra Logic
Hitachi
9%
9%
10%
12%
Sun Microsystems
N/A
Quantum
10%
13%
N/A*
Dell/Compellent
Dell/EqualLogic
NetApp
HP
IBM
EMC
16%
21%
22%
27%
37%
40%
40%
44%
52%
60%
2012
R4190212/28
add incremental capacity. These factors have

made Quantums Chapa a believer; he predicts the model will become pervasive and
cited ESG research projecting that 80% of
storage sales will come from scale-out systems by 2015.
Looking at the bigger picture, scale out is no
longer just for files, nor is it exclusively a storage architecture. Several firms, including
Coraid, Clustrix, Nutanix and Pivot3, offer appliances that look for all the world like plainvanilla 2U serverswhich, essentially, they
are. But under the hood they not only support
block file systems via SAN protocols, they run
local hypervisors for VM workloads. These
vendors readily admit taking a cue from big
players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft
(Azure) that have built public clouds around
commodity hardware. Our goal is to take this
paradigm, this Google goodness, to the
masses," says Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix.
Pandey believes the best way to do this is via
what he calls a unified and converged plugand-play appliance.
Pivot3 takes the appliance concept even furFebruary 2012 25
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Figure 20
Leaders in Deduplication
Which of the following vendors do you consider leaders in deduplication?
2012
2011
59%
The problem is that when youre using this

R
kind of cloud-like approach, where the workloadVMs and datais automatically
2%
2%
Dont know
5%
3%
Other
6%
5%
FalconStor Software
8%
N/A
HP/LeftHand Networks
Quantum
9%
10%
12%
N/A
HP/3PAR
Microsoft
15%
16%
17%
Symantec NetBackup
24%
22%
26%
IBM/Diligent ProtecTier
NetApp
28%
27%
29%
27%
HP
ther by bundling scale-out compute/storage

systems with software designed for specific applications. The company started with video-surveillance and, according to Thierry, has become
the leading IP SAN supplier to this market.
Next, the company found another application,
VDI, that can take advantage of the integrated
suite of VM server, scale-out storage and software. It will appeal to IT teams that understand
servers but not storage and dont want to deal
with building, configuring and managing a
SAN. True to the appliance model, these systems are simple and scalable with costs that increase linearly as you add capacity.
For server administrators, converged scaleout appliances expose stock VM hosts to a hypervisor management system like vCenter,
while the storage side appears as standard
iSCSI target devices exposing LUNs and/or a
NAS (NFS, CIFS) file system. One obvious advantage of a converged scale-out architecture
is that an applications data is often local to a
compute node, the qualification being that
the systems software control plane does an
effective job of automatic data placement.
45%
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EMC/Avamar/Data Domain
Previous
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parceled out to any system in your scale-out

array, you get the benefits of high data
throughput only if the controller is smart
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eral nodes. When considering these systems,

ensure that the control software is either
smart about optimizing data placement or
configurable to allow IT to pin certain VMs
about ensuring that the VMs and app data sit

on the same machine. In some instances, this
may not be the case; the data might be
spread in a distributed file system across sevFigure 21
Storage Concerns

1%
3%
Other
4%
2%
Inability to meet small-scale file restore demands
8%
4%
Inability to comply with industry or government regulations
6%
6%
Inability to meet internal SLAs
13%
11%
21%
17%
Insufficient staff training
19%
15%
Backup windows are too small to meet needs
Insufficient staffing
19%
21%
25%
27%
Insufficient tools for storage management
26%
25%
28%
30%
35%
29%
Insufficient budget to meet business demands
Lack of sufficient disaster recovery planning and preparedness
45%
40%
Insufficient storage resources for mission-critical applications
40%
Data loss and data security
Insufficient storage resources for departmental or individual use
2011
49%
2012
Inability to meet large-scale recovery demands (like e-discovery requests)
What are your top concerns when it comes to storage?
R4190212/15
and data sets together so that they always run

on the same box, and to designate that highIOPS apps get preferential dibs on boxes with
internal flash cards.
To this end, much like cloud software stacks
like Open Stack or Eucalyptus, Nutanixs design uses control software that analyzes data
usage, VM movement and metadata and
which itself runs distributed across multiple
scale-out nodes. (See our report on private
cloud stacks.) This scale-out strategy of keeping most application data local to the compute node also improves the efficacy of local
SSDs. For example, if only some nodes in the
scale-out cluster have solid-state memory, the
control software can ensure that applications
and their associated data with high IOPS requirements run on those nodes.
A nagging problem with scale-out architectures is a lack of resilience and redundancy. Its not enough to spread user data
out, RAID-like, across devices; IT must ensure
that control systems and metadata are likewise replicated. While details vary, all the
scale-out storage approaches weve disFebruary 2012 27
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Responding to discovery requests
17%
11%
Meeting backup SLAs
11%
14%
Understanding the business value of different types of data
17%
12%
Meeting compliance requirements
15%
N/A
Converging data and storage networks
16%
19%
Implementing a storage resource management system
18%
20%
19%
Implementing a SAN
27%
25%
20%
Cloud storage or storage as a service
19%
19%
41%
33%
Implementing a disaster recovery plan
Monitoring storage utilization
Improved capacity planning
37%
37%
36%
39%
42%
37%
Reclaiming unused storage
Improved allocation of storage

Automating the migration of data from one tier of storage to another
2011
48%
51%
2012
2%
2%
Planned Projects
What key projects and processes do you plan to implement over the next 12 months?
a maxed-out Nutanix cluster of 13 appliances

with 52 compute nodes delivers 375K IOPS
and 26 Gbps of sequential I/O. One reason is
network latencyor more precisely, the lack
thereof. We dont really have
a network, he says. No data
is more than one hop away.
Although some converged
scale-out appliances, like
Pivot3s VDI server and Clustrixs database engine, are
designed for specific applications, others, like those from
Coraid and Nutanix, are general-purpose systems suitable for any virtualized workload. Pandey says that while
his company sees a lot of interest for VDI implementations, other customers use its
systems for the standard list
of Microsoft back-office applications: Exchange, ShareR4190212/16
Point and SQL Server. Quantums Chapa adds that the
Other
Figure 22
data) across multiple physical systems.

As it turns out, the theoretical advantages of
a distributed yet unified architecture translate
into very real performance gains. Pandey says
9%
9%
cussed, whether appliances or even cloud

software stacks, achieve this by instantiating
the data plane (user data, VM images) and
control plane (management software, meta-
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scale-out storage market is also benefiting

from the growth of big data applications in finance, oil and gas, and life sciencesanyplace
users are looking for bigger, faster, cheaper.
Figure 23
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Strategy Status

Do you have a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy and process?
2012
2011
Yes, and we test it regularly
Vendor Rundown: EMC Still Leads,

but Dont Forget IBM
No state of technology survey would be
complete without a popularity contest, so we
asked respondents about the vendors they
use for Tier 1 and 2 deployments and which
they consider leaders in backup, archiving,
deduplication and storage virtualization. EMC
would have hit for the cycle by topping every
category again this year were it not for robust
competition in the Tier 1/2 market, where both
EMC and HP lost ground. IBM was the big winner in both primary storage and backup, gaining seven points in each category.
While Dell/EqualLogic did take a hit in the
Tier 1/2 sweepstakes, its important to note
that, in our 2011 survey, we didnt include
Compellent under the Dell umbrella. Although
the percentage of respondents using or planning to use EqualLogic dropped a shocking 18
38%
29%
Yes, but we rarely test it
43%
42%
No, but we plan to implement one in the next 12 months
17%
23%
No
2%
6%
points this year, under Dell, Compellent increased by an equally startling 21 points, from
15% to 36%. Such wild swingsno other vendor had share moves of more than seven
pointshint of confusion on the part of Dell
users when registering their responses. On balance, however, Dell retains a solid position
among the top five storage vendors.
When it comes to backup and archiving
R4190212/19
hardware, as in Tier 1/2 storage, IBM gained

ground, which implies a winning storage formula. Once again, theres confusion over Dells
bifurcated product line, so its not clear how
much, if any, share it actually lost. HP is holding
its own, while EMC is again the big loser, dropping eight pointsdo we detect a trend here?
When it comes to changes among deduplication vendors, its pretty much status quo or
February 2012 29
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Extent of Storage Technology Use

To what degree are the following storage technologies and features in use at your organization?
12% 7% 4%
5%
18%
15% 5%
57%
13%
Solid-state disks (SSDs) on disk array
44%
13%
Solid-state disks (SSDs) within servers
40%
24%
23%
21%
46%
13%
Automated tiering
20%
11% 9%
13%
20%
40%
9%
File virtualization
while the percentage saying they cant get

R
enough staff training, another item that usually takes a hit when funds get tight, fell by
Use widely
18%
16%
17%
21%
35%
41%
15%
Thin provisioning
20%
21%
4%
Encryption
11%
12%
16%
35%
11%
38%
17%
16%
20%
21%
13%
22%
30%
22%
7%
Data compression
30%
8%
19%
24%
23%
8%
Data deduplication
15%
21%
8%
26%
14%
16%
3%
Limited production use
24%
26%
22%
16%
23%
30%
43%
19%
12%
Under evaluation/pilot
22%
No plans for immediate use
41%
Wont use
Replication
Conclusions and Recommendations

2012 is shaping up as a good year to address storage problems that have been allowed to languish. The portion of our respondents citing budget constraints as a top
storage concern dropped six points this year,
Figure 24
15%
red numbers across the board; EMC still leads,

but the gap is shrinking. This is likely a sign
that buyers arent paying as much attention
to data reduction and optimization features
as they used to, instead assuming these are
part of the standard feature set of any new
storage system.
As for the upstart vendors weve discussed,
theyre starting to make an impact. For example, the threat from Fusion-io and other
flash pure plays surely nudged EMC to introduce its own line of server-side flash cards.
GigaOM Pro analyst George Gilbert sums it
up thusly: The big disruption for EMC is that
theyve built their business around being the
mainframe of the storage market. If you look
at the Web-scale data centers, theyre all
about scaling out vs. scaling up.
11%
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R4190212/8
four points. Instead, storage professionals are

worried about data loss, security and adequate resources to meet new application deFebruary 2012 30
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Figure 25
Importance of Storage Technologies and Features

How important are the following storage technologies and features when making storage purchase decisions?
5%
15%
16%
31%
64%
40%
45%
Solid-state drives (SSDs) within servers
46%
38%
Solid-state drives (SSDs) on disk array
41%
Automated tiering
42%
34%
47%
36%
42%
Thin provisioning
44%
34%
File virtualization
of server virtualization has many planning

R
consolidation projects. Clearly, the new generation of scale-out storage hardware
17%
19%
22%
22%
25%
50%
25%
30%
46%
18%
Data compression
51%
48%
20%
Data deduplication
24%
32%
34%
40%
26%
21%
18%
43%
42%
40%
52%
37%
Very important
31%
Somewhat important
36%
Not important
Encryption
Our latest survey shows that IT

is over the hype curve of
deduplication. Now storage professionals can settle in and learn
to maximize the value of this
data-reduction technology.
mands. These changing priorities are reflected

in project priorities, where fewer are planning
virtualization or disaster recovery projects
(each dropped eight points) and more are
concerned about reducing waste and smartly
incorporating cloud storage services.
As you refine your storage strategy, priorities
and plans for the coming year, here are five areas to address:
> Develop a solid-state strategy. Merely
replacing high-end HDDs with SDDs leaves
a lot of potential solid-state performance
gains on the table. Thats because most traditional storage arrays are designed to work
around the inherent deficiencies of a mechanical system. So think beyond solid-state
disks to solid-state systems. Look for I/Obound applications that can really benefit
from orders-of-magnitude improvements in
throughput and latency, and where theres
more bang for the buck in speeding things
up vs. adding capacity.
> Consolidate intelligently. Most IT shops
are still sitting on a large base of direct-attached storage, but the widespread adoption
11%
Related Report:
Deduplication Grows Up
reports
Replication
Table of Contents
R4190212/11
couldnt have come at a more opportune

time. Finally, we dont always need to blow big
bucks on a huge FC storage frame to consoliFebruary 2012 31
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date effectively. Think about whether some

applications that are already virtualized, particularly those with large and rapidly growing
capacity requirements, might work better on
an Ethernet-based scale-out system.
> Continue work on data/storage network consolidation. With the price of 10
Gbps Ethernet dropping below $200 per port
and integrated 10 Gbps interfaces becoming
the norm on new server and storage hardware, its time to get serious about upgrading
your data center networks and making Ethernet your storage backbone, as we discussed
in depth in a recent report. Particularly when
used with scale-out products, Ethernet,
whether for block or file storage, makes for a
great low-cost and incrementally scalable
storage network.
> Develop a cloud storage strategy. If
youre one of the 43% not using cloud storage and with no plans to do, its time to do
some soul searching. Cloud storage is mature, reliable and particularly well suited for
data backup, archival and disaster recovery
scenarios, and security doesnt need to be a
Figure 26
Use of Storage Virtualization

Do you use storage virtualization?
2012
2011
Yes, all of our disk storage is in a single virtual pool of storage
7%
5%
Yes, some of our storage systems are in a virtual pool
31%
31%
No, but we are planning to implement it in the next 12 months
8%
12%
No, but we are looking into it
30%
29%
No, were not interested
15%
15%
Dont know
9%
8%
deal breaker. For starters, see our report on

building a DR and business continuity strategy around cloud services. Yes, cloud storage
costs can quickly add up, so you need to do
R4190212/17
a TCO analysis going out five years and use

providers selectively. But just saying no is
shortsighted.
> Get serious about data encryption. The
February 2012 32
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biggest concern most cloud users have remains data security. But as our survey shows,
storage pros understand that data loss isnt an
issue only when using outside services; its
now the leading storage concern in general,
and data encryption has become one of the
top technologies buyers look at when evaluating new ways to protect information. But its
not enough to just get some self-encrypting
drives and hope for the bestyou still need
to worry about key management and protecting data in flight to and stored in the cloud
(see our InformationWeek 2012 Data Encryption report for more). So make sure a holistic
encryption plan is part of any new data security and cloud storage project.
Figure 27
Storage Management Tools

What sort of storage management tools do you use?
2012
2011
Those supplied by storage array vendors
74%
73%
Big systems management platforms like Tivoli, OpenView or Unicenter
23%
16%
Point products used in an ad hoc approach
20%
28%
Other
3%
5%
R4190212/21
February 2012 33
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APPENDIX
Figure 28
Storage-Related Tasks
What storage activities do you typically spend a significant amount of time performing?
2012
2011
Performing backup and archiving of data
55%
58%
Monitoring and managing storage systems
49%
54%
Developing strategies and tactics to improve our storage utilization and systems
33%
34%
Allocating storage capacity to applications and servers
32%
33%
Looking at new products and technologies
27%
30%
Other
3%
2%
R4190212/31
February 2012 34
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Figure 29
Network Interfaces Used on Storage Arrays

Which of the following network interfaces do you use on your enterprise storage arrays?
2012
2011
Gigabit Ethernet NAS
54%
54%
Gigabit Ethernet SAN (iSCSI or FCoE)
39%
43%
4 Gbps Fibre Channel SAN
31%
41%
10 Gbps Ethernet SAN (iSCSI or FCoE)
24%
16%
10 Gbps Ethernet NAS
24%
23%
8 Gbps Fibre Channel SAN
22%
21%
R4190212/13
February 2012 35
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Figure 30
Use of Multiprotocol Arrays

Do you use, or plan to use, multiprotocol arrays (i.e., Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI) natively supporting both SAN
and NAS for enterprise storage?
2012
2011
Yes, and we plan to add multiprotocol arrays in the future
24%
25%
Yes, but we have no plans to add multiprotocol arrays in the future
14%
12%
No, but we are investigating multiprotocol arrays and plan to use them in the future
22%
28%
No, and we dont plan to use multiprotocol arrays in the future
18%
20%
Dont know
22%
15%
R4190212/14
February 2012 36
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Figure 31
File Virtualization Deployment Plans

What are your deployment plans for file virtualization?
2012
2011
We deploy file virtualization products to help manage storage resources
13%
13%
We plan to deploy a file virtualization product in the next 6 to 12 months
9%
11%
We are investigating file virtualization technology
33%
33%
We have no plans to deploy file virtualization
33%
31%
Whats file virtualization?
12%
12%
R4190212/18
February 2012 37
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Figure 32
Scope of Involvement
Which of the following best describes your involvement in storage?
I manage IT staffers, including storage people
35%
I am a member of the IT team, and I do some work with storage
31%
I am a member of the IT team, but storage is not part of my job description
8%
I work mainly on storage technology, projects and processes
6%
I manage the storage team
5%
I work in a business unit/group, not in the IT department
5%
I manage IT staffers, but storage is not among my responsibilities
5%
I dont work in a corporate IT organization, but I consult with companies on IT issues
4%
I work mainly on compliance projects
1%
R4190212/1
February 2012 38
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Figure 33
Size of IT Organization
How many employees (not including outsourced head count) make up your IT organization?
2012
2011
Were a one-person IT shop
7%
7%
2-49
44%
45%
50-99
11%
12%
100-499
20%
18%
500-999
9%
4%
1,000-4,999
5%
7%
5,000 or more
4%
7%
R4190212/32
February 2012 39
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Figure 34
Job Title
Which of the following best describes your job title?
IT director/manager
40%
IT executive (C-level/VP)
Other
Consultant
Line-of-business management
Non-IT executive (C-level/VP)
10%
4%
5%
2%
5%
34%
IT/IS staff
R4190212/33
February 2012 40
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Figure 35
Company Revenue
Which of the following dollar ranges includes the annual revenue of your entire organization?
Less than $6 million
Dont know/decline to say
12%
13%
Government/nonprofit
$6 million to $49.9 million
9%
$5 billion or more
14%
10%
10%
11%
$1 billion to $4.9 billion
5%
16%
R4190212/34
February 2012 41
2%
3%
7%
3%
5%
Other
Utilities
2%
3%
Telecommunications/ISPs
3%
Retail/e-commerce
Nonprofit
Media/entertainment
Manufacturing/industrial, noncomputer
2%
Logistics/transportation
IT vendors
Healthcare/medical
Government
Financial services
Energy
2%
Electronics
Education
9%
12%
11%
12%
14%
Table of Contents
2%
Consumer goods
5%
Consulting and business services
3%
Construction/engineering
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Figure 36
What is your organization's primary industry?
Industry
R4190212/35
February 2012 42
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Figure 37
Company Size
Approximately how many employees are in your organization?
50-99
100-499
7%
Fewer than 50
24%
10%
10,000 or more
18%
12%
7%
500-999
22%
5,000-9,999
1,000-4,999
R4190212/36
February 2012 43
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State of Storage 2012

Report ID: R4190212

State of Storage 2012

10 Figure 4: Impact of FCoE and 10 Gbps

28 Figure 22: Planned Projects

State of Storage 2012

Kurt Marko is a technology writer and IT industry veteran, now focused on IT

2012 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited

State of Storage 2012

State of Storage 2012

Survey Name InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey

State of Storage 2012

Storage 2012: Size Isnt All That Matters

age features and technologies they most value,

Storage Under Active Management

file their plans for the coming months. Well

State of Storage 2012

Data Growth Rate

Less than 10% a year

change is so small that until confirmed with

A Challenge to Traditional Architectures

Related Report: SAN RFI

capacity, while still not a trivial matter, is less

State of Storage 2012

SCALE OUT VS. SCALE UP

New Terms for an Old Concept

here have always been two design

ning a high-end transaction processing application to tax the throughput of mechanical

tion of compute and storage workloads.

cause of the mechanical nature of spinning

State of Storage 2012

Technologies Used for Connectivity

Direct attached storage

Network file system (NFS/CIFS)

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)/SAN

spring, internal private clouds, are not the only

State of Storage 2012

Storage, Network Consolidation Soars

Pundit predictions of the death of Fibre

Impact of FCoE and 10 Gbps Ethernet Deployment on Fibre Channel

spondents using network-attached devices

need any native FC in the long term. Despite

State of Storage 2012

Dedicated Storage Team

No, but we have one or more staffers

model. Central management software and

quarter of our respondents cite insufficient

liability and security trump bleeding-edge

State of Storage 2012

Storage Consolidation Plans

Yes, weve already consolidated

Yes, were planning to do

gies they consider most important when

52% of respondents, respectively, fewer than

State of Storage 2012

storage technologies they have deployed or

tip the competitive balance are likely to be

Storage Technologies in Use

Massive array of idle disks (MAID)

Solid-state disks (SSDs) within servers

Solid-state disks (SSDs) on disk array

Virtual tape libraries (VTLs)

Note: Percentages reflect a response of use widely or limited production use