The Aberdeen Group released a report titled “Enterprise Storage 2001: From Back-Office Afterthought to Strategic Buying Decision ” today. This report states that the enterprise storage market is at a crossroads.
This storage crossroads exists because companies are increasingly being put in a position where they must decide either to stay with existing storage solutions or go with new untested technologies that seem have huge potential.
These new technologies include storage virtualization, which aims to simplify storage for users by defining storage by its functionality rather than location or physicality, and storage over IP, which can loosely be defined as taking the concept of the Application Service Provider and moving over to storage.
According to the Aberdeen Group, the report outlines criteria for evaluating enterprise products and services based on necessary principles of availability, manageability, scalability, robustness, flexibility, breadth, and integration.
It also profiles storage vendors such as Brocade Communication Systems; Compaq Computer Corporation; Computer Associates International; Dell Computer Corporation; EMC Corporation; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi Data Systems; IBM; Legato Systems; Network Appliance; Storage Networks Inc; Storage Technology Corporation; Sun Microsystems; and Veritas Software.
