IDC: Cloud computing will drive storage sales growth

As public cloud service providers and private cloud-environment users invest in cloud computing support infrastructure, cloud computing will be the main driver of new IT spending over the next five years. According to IDC's latest forecasts, the combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of public cloud service providers on storage hardware, software and professional services will reach 23.6% over the period from 2010 to 2015, while corporate storage spending for private clouds will grow by 28.9%. By 2015, the total cost of global public and private cloud storage will be $22.6 billion trillion.

"Despite the current economic uncertainty, IDC expects the public cloud and private cloud service providers to be the broadest investors in IT products and services because they will continue to build global facilities and expand their service offerings," said Richard Villars, IDC's vice president for storage systems and executive strategy. ”

The most significant driving force for storage consumption over the next three years will be based on public cloud applications and the emergence of infrastructure vendors. Many of these cloud-based providers (ITunes, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook) are content storage, focused on collecting, organizing, and providing access to a large number of digital content. At the same time, other cloud-based service providers have begun to focus on delivering IT infrastructure and applications in a "service-like" mode (such as Salesforce.com, WebEx Connect, Amazon Web services, etc.). Over the past few years, these companies have built large storage networks, expanding service offerings, entering new markets, and expanding their geographic footprint.

While expanding the public cloud, many organizations have started deploying their own private cloud for application, computing, and content (archiving) storage. Many of these private cloud deployments, such as governments and research sites, are comparable in scope and complexity to the public cloud environment, while others are limited in scope.

Public cloud service providers and the main users of the private cloud environment have five information requirements that will drive their existing storage requirements, including:

More effective delivery of information/applications to Internet clients

Reduce upfront infrastructure investment levels (e.g., reduce costs and time associated with deploying new IT and computing infrastructure)

Minimize internal IT infrastructure investments associated with unexpected or unpredictable workloads

Reduce and/or disperse long-term information archiving-related ongoing costs

Achieve near-continuous, real-time analysis of large amounts of data (large data) generated by customers, partners, and machines

To meet these different requirements, organizations will continue to require low-cost storage capacity, as well as a growing range of advanced data transformation, security, and analysis solutions.

"The challenge for the storage industry will be to balance the requirements of public cloud service providers for Low-cost hardware, as well as advanced software solutions in areas such as target storage, automated data tiering, large data processing, advanced archiving services," Villars said. For storage solution providers, large data deployments may be the most critical new market for the next decade. Providing a powerful combination of a complete large data solution-including hardware, software, and implementation services-will be the primary factor in success. Similarly, a strong combination of active archive storage solutions will be a key differentiator for private content/Archive cloud deployments. ”

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)