(excerpt from Enterprisestorageforum.com)
The software-defined storage (SDS) market will quickly expand over the next few years, according to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) latest forecast.
In 2021, the worldwide SDS sales will total nearly $16.2 billion after registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5 percent during the intervening years (2017-2021). IDC attributes this growth to the hastening shift from traditional IT infrastructures, which typically favored hardware-centric dual-controller storage array designs, to cloud environments based on commodity equipment.
“For IT organizations undergoing digital transformation, SDS provides a good match for the capabilities needed – flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity and off-the-shelf hardware,” said IDC research director Eric Burgener in prepared remarks. “As these features appear more on buyers’ lists of purchase criteria, enterprise storage revenue will continue to shift toward SDS.”
Adding upward momentum to the overall SDS market are three key segments, object, file and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), observed IDC.
The HCI portion of the market is particularly dynamic and expected to generate $7.15 billion in 2021 after posting a five-year CAGR of 26.6 percent and chipping away at the market for traditional SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network-attached storage) solutions. The object and file storage segments are poised to undergo CAGRs of 10.3 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively.
In the meantime, IT heavyweights are buying their way into the hot HCI segment.
Arxys is well poised to be a contender and should see continued success in the Software Defined Storage market with value added solutions and strong partnerships.