The rapid increase in the amount of digital data that needs to be stored is pressuring organizations to increase capital expenditures associated with the acquisition of storage capacity and operating expenses associated with management of this capacity.


At the same time, economic issues are hindering these organizations' ability to increase budgets to meet the growing demand for storage. The resulting deadlock has paved the way for the adoption of various technologies that help increase utilization of existing storage resources and optimize the amount of data that needs to be stored.

A new IDC study analyzed the results of a United States–based survey of 500 storage end users that currently deploy or plan to deploy storage and/or data efficiency technologies in their datacenters as well as the benefits these users were able to gain as a result of implementing these technologies. Technologies covered by this study include thin provisioning, storage virtualization, storage tiering, data compression, data deduplication, and thin replication.

Key findings in the study include:

• Adoption of storage and data efficiency technologies typically comes in stages, starting with data compression and deduplication, followed by storage virtualization and tiering, and then by thin provisioning and replication.
• It is typical that end users' savings expectations in storage spending and storage capacity as a result of implementing storage and data efficiency technologies are lower than what current users were able to recognize in the past 12 months, which suggests that future benefits might be underestimated.
• Data compression and storage virtualization were identified as the two most adopted storage efficiency technologies while data deduplication was named as the most desirable storage efficiency technology for implementation in the near future.

IT organizations will continue to face pressures influencing the ongoing adoption of storage efficiency technologies. This pressure comes from an increased share of storage spending in the overall IT budget as well as an annual growth in data ranging from 40-60%.

"Technologies that help increase utilization of existing and new storage assets are widely welcomed by end users," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems at IDC. "IDC's research shows that the increased use of storage efficiency technologies is one of the major contributing factors in the slowdown of storage capacity shipments over the past 12 months. As awareness of these technologies increases, storage vendors should be ready to deliver a variety of technologies to the whole spectrum of customers, from large businesses all the way down to small companies."