New Study Gives Fresh Insight on the Storage Market

TheInfoPro a New York-based technology research network, today released the findings of its in-depth interviews with 152 F1000 storage professionals and 40 institutional investors regarding storage networking and storage management vendors, issues, products and future intentions.

The studies feature a unique methodology that enables TIP to highlight inconsistencies in how vendors are regarded by the investor and user communities and gather detailed, direct quotations from users and investors to explain their vendor ratings. Ratings and quotations were obtained from users for over 40 vendors, including EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi, Dell, Sun, Computer Associates, Cisco, Brocade, Veritas, Legato, McData, StorageTek, BMC, Emulex, Qlogic and Network Appliance.

The TIP studies also focused on user and investor spending plans. The results demonstrate that users are shifting from Direct Attached Storage to Storage Area Networks. But, contrary to what analyst firms have predicted, less than 5% of users are planning to increase their spending on Network Attached Storage. From an investor perspective 50% plan to increase their investments in storage companies over the next six months.

Other findings from the study include:

• EMC, Veritas and Brocade top the preferred vendor ratings, appearing on 60-85% of users’ vendor “short list”.
• Over 70% of Investors expect significant growth in M&A activity in the storage market in the next 12 months as the sector consolidates.
• For heavily hyped storage technologies such as iSCSI, Infiniband and Virtualization, planned adoption is 12-24 months further out than others have projected.
• Over 25% of the interviewees are considering replacing their primary storage vendor in the next 12 months.
• Average “street pricing” discounts for SAN & NAS range from 20-39%.
• Several key functionality gaps are driving the significant planned expenditures on storage management products as users begin to replace “homegrown” tools.

“The keys to the value of these studies are in the 110 pages of direct quotes from the clients of the vendors we studied, as well as our ability to directly compare investor and user ratings of the same vendors on the same criteria,” said David Taylor, Chief Research Officer of TheInfoPro.net.