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Research Report: Scale-out Storage Market Forecast 2010-2015
ESG Research Report
Mar 09, 2011
The core architectures of external enterprise storage solutions have gone largely unchanged for the past 20 years. The technology surrounding storage systems, however, has evolved, shifting from bus and tag to SCSI and then to Fibre Channel and IP, and from DAS to SAN and NAS. But core architectures have primarily been classified in two ways: as modular and monolithic. Both are fixed-scale systems in which capacity in the form of disk spindles (either HDD or solid state) are added to a single- or dual-controller system until the maximum capacity is met, at which point a new discrete system is added to increase capacity. Monolithic systems typically support open systems and mainframe environments; they are massive, enclosed in a proprietary data center rack—with a built-in controller (single or dual)—that fills with disks over time. Modular systems have one or two controller modules and self-contained shelves of disks housed in and added to a standard data center rack to increase capacity. Users manage both physical disks and logical representations of disks (LUNs) in these systems for data layout, performance tuning, and capacity management and expansion.
“Scale-out” storage systems overcome the physical boundaries of racks and modules to create virtualized systems that can scale front-end processing power as well as back-end capacity by adding new processor or capacity nodes while still functioning as a single system. They often don’t need the levels of individual physical disk management, data layout, and performance tuning required by traditional monolithic and modular systems.
Consequently, scale-out platforms can provide a path to both increased performance and operational cost reduction—benefits that are increasingly putting these systems on the radars of enterprise IT buyers. Scale-out solutions can typically expand into the multi-petabyte range under a single system image, providing an ideal platform for storage consolidation. They help IT reduce management costs and data center equipment footprint, which reduces floor space and power and cooling costs. Finally, increased storage consolidation onto a shared resource means utilization rates are higher, so users get more “bang” for their storage buck.
Designed as a companion publication to ESG’s recent research report on scale-out storage market trends, ESG has created a scale-out storage market forecast—defined as ESG’s estimate of the total, worldwide annual capacity and revenue associated with scale-out storage in the commercial and government sectors—through the year 2015.
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