EnterpriseStorageForum details a new report on the data storage market that discusses a key technology development.
The growing popularity of server virtualization means big sales for data storage vendors, and EMC (NYSE: EMC) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) are the companies best positioned to take advantage of the trend, according to a new report.
William Blair & Co. analysts Jason Ader and Dmitry Netis penned a 141-page report on the data storage sector that was released yesterday. Server virtualization, they wrote, “is the key technology development that will shape the future of the storage industry.”
In the near term, that’s good news for the sector. “As servers become centralized and virtualized in mainframe-like grids, storage needs to become more distributed and networked,” Ader and Netis wrote. For every $1 spent on server virtualization projects, customers spend roughly $2 to $3 on storage, they said.
But in the long term, server virtualization could hurt the data storage sector, “as it will result in a siphoning of management functionality from the storage device to the server, raising the risk that storage systems will gradually become commoditized just like servers,” the analysts wrote.