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If you believe what the researchers say, the tendency to hoard is not just a personal thing but is being played out in businesses too and is set to cost organisations millions of pounds to keep it all safe and sound. This is good news for the data storage market in general but the survivors as always will be the vendors that match the best technology with customer needs at the best prices. Let's take a closer look at the trends and how they might play out in the storage market.

Last summer, we commissioned our own survey, conducted by an independent market research agency, Vanson Bourne, and the results reaffirmed that the majority of organisations tend not to manage data storage efficiently. Responses from the 300 US and UK based IT decision makers interviewed highlighted that the majority of respondents in organisations with more than 1,000 employees tend to use manual processes to analyse and migrate stored data and, most importantly, rarely delete data preferring to add more storage as required.

Indeed, the survey revealed that 62% of organisations rarely delete data and grapple with the challenge of managing long-term data storage. Furthermore 68% of participants said that they manually analyse and move their long-term data to different locations, and only delete limited amounts of stored data.

This is not necessarily surprising in sectors like media and entertainment, life sciences, medical imaging, oil and gas, government, and video surveillance, where much of the data is retained for extended periods due to a number of factors such as regulatory, compliance or governance requirements as well as the opportunity to repurpose and monetise information in the future. However, this trend seems to be the same across all sectors. So as data storage professionals, what does this trend mean for us?

If IT professionals are still manually migrating data, we, the vendors are possibly failing on two counts: firstly we clearly have not communicated properly about the great tools out there that can help them manage their data storage more efficiently, and secondly we have not ourselves fully realised the market potential for the right kind of solutions that address these problems.

There is certainly a great opportunity for analytical software to extract value from and monetise rich content, and there is still also ongoing massive potential for increasingly cost-effective data storage. Those who will win out, are the vendors that want to help companies manage their storage for the long term and steer their research and development efforts to achieve just that.

From the supply chain point of view, channel partners have an important role to play in making sure that customers get to see the bigger picture and consider technologies that they might not have initially thought of. For example, some end users may think that they would be better off with the newest technology such as Flash storage but they may find that cost is a real draw-back and too much for the purse-strings, particularly if large volumes of data are present. More often than not the ideal solution is a combination of solutions that delivers the best results. So in a large organisation this could be a combination of Flash and HDD for primary storage and tape for the vast volumes of data must be stored for much longer periods of time.

Although nothing is set in stone, as all technologies are evolving as the drive for better performance at better costs is universal across the storage sector. General predictions seem to support the view that this year we'll start to see the impacts of consolidation of the Flash vendor market and possibly some new technologies joining the fold at the primary storage end. Beyond that we are seeing a tendency for the HDD and tape vendors to take their storage to the next level of capacity and performance whilst offering ever better returns on investment. Spectra Logic meanwhile, with its BlackPearl technology, is taking the lead in the use of tape for deep storage.

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