The Software-defined storage will grow from $8.5 billion in 2017 to almost $18.2 billion by 2022, indicating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4%, said a report. According to BCC Research, growing demand for flexible, application-specific scalability is driving growth for software-defined storage products and services.
In its newly released report, BCC said that the storage industry is one of the crucial and fastest growing segments in the high technology industry. This prediction is lined with the leading storage firms such as IBM and Dell EMC who have forecasted that storage data would exponentially increase in size, volume and complexity.
According to Dell EMC, data will grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020; a 50-fold increase from the amount of data stored in the beginning of 2010. Storage volume is increasing in IT environments due to digital transformation, mobile computing and more complex cloud architectures. The volume is increasing by more than 40% annually. Organizations are increasingly turning to software-defined storage as the primary economic alternative to simply adding more storage racks to keep pace with the burgeoning volume of data.
The report emphasises that software-defined architectures are becoming viable across major IT platforms, paving the way for a software-defined data center that leverages the combination of improved operational control and cost efficiency. Thus, software-defined storage is has become a key element of hyper-converged infrastructure that is at the core of the software-defined architecture. It presents great value on its own and enables greater transformation of the IT infrastructure.
According to report, fully 80% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. Much of that data is unstructured, meaning it does not reside in traditional row column databases and is typically more storage intensive.
Companies in the North American market are learning how to adapt to regulatory requirements to maximize the value of software-defined storage deployments. Software-defined storage is expected to surpass traditional storage in terms of market size beginning in 2020.
“On average, 40% of corporations are increasing their storage capacity by 11% to 30% annually while another 20% of firms are upping capacity by 41% to over 100% year over year,” said Michael Sullivan, Senior Editor and report author, BCC Research.
“Significantly, the storage increases are occurring irrespective of whether or not business revenues or employee headcount remains the same or rises. Legacy solutions become cost prohibitive at these high growth rates, and the combination of data analytics, regulatory requirements and other business critical mandates make it impossible for IT organizations to reduce the inevitable exponential expansion of storage infrastructure,” said Michael.
