I have not blogged for a while; we’ve been busy putting all the pieces in place to kick off a new multi-client research project on scale-out storage adoption in enterprise IT. In my January brief on unstructured data trends for 2010, I listed continued interest in scale-out platforms as the number one trend to watch. Feel free to click over and read the brief (it’s freely available), but here’s an excerpt:
ESG research conducted in late 2008/early 2009 showed significant user interest in scale-out NAS solutions thanks to their scalability, business agility, and operational efficiencies. With 2009 spending slowing to a near stop, interest in scale-out mostly stayed just that: interest. In 2010, ESG expects that interest to translate into actual spending, aided by increased visibility from big-name vendors like EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, and NetApp as they continue to invest in scale-out offerings and validate commodity-based scale-out architectures for enterprise applications.
The interest we saw in late 2008 was pretty high: 38% of those surveyed planned to adopt within 12 months, 37% are interested in the technology! We wrote a research brief on the topic (this one is password protected, clients only), Scale-Out NAS Adoption & Market Drivers –there is more data in the brief including cuts by industry, key features, adoption drivers, and impact to scale-up architectures. That data came from our enterprise storage survey, conducted in late 2008. This new project gives us a chance to dig deeper into the drivers for scale-out storage architectures (both block and file). I am really looking forward to putting more metrics around a number of questions, such as:
- Awareness of, usage of, interest in and plans for new scale-out architectures
- Prioritization of key business/IT drivers (e.g., cost reduction, application drivers)
- Key applications and usage
- Benefits realized/quantified by early adopters
- Plans for integrating scale-out in private cloud or service oriented architectures
- Impact on data center infrastructure
- Primary customer concerns
- Vendor preferences
- Vertical industry dynamics
- Where solutions are deployed (LOB/HQ)
- Impact on scale-up storage deployment
- Most important criteria for choosing scale-out technology & vendor
If you are interested in the research, feel free to contact us. We’ll be publishing some reports with the new data in the second half of 2010–after the sponsor exclusivity period expires (pretty standard stuff for multi-client reports)–and I’ll share some of the high points here in my blog.
Good blogs on the topic: Steve O’Donnell recently blogged on Internet-scale log files as a driver and Storagebod blogged on industry developments.
Read Terri’s other blog entries at IT Depends.
