Technavio’s latest global data center SAN (storage area network) market 2016-2020 report highlights the top three emerging trends that are predicted to impact the market through 2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as something that has potential for significant impact on the market and contributes to its growth or decline.

“The key benefit offered by SAN is the better utilization of storage infrastructure. In a SAN environment, separate storage arrays are combined as a centralized storage network. In a centralized storage network, this implies allocation of storage resources to multiple servers through a central pool. In the future, advanced storage area networks are expected to play a key role in fulfilling the storage needs of enterprise applications through virtualized networks. These storage networks enable multiple applications to run on virtual machines at the same time through a centralized storage resource,” said Technavio’s senior industry analyst for data center research, Rakesh Panda.

On premise data storage is becoming expensive for enterprises, and hence, many companies with large data storage requirements are shifting to the cloud by selecting providers such as Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. This demand will be further augmented by reduced cost, better scalability, and high quality storage made available through modern SAN deployments in data centers, reports Technavio research.

Technavio’s market research study identifies the following top three emerging trends for the global data center SAN market 2016-2020:

  • Growing popularity of software defined storage
  • Cost effectivity offered by flash-based storage devices
  • Unified storage systems: the future of SAN solution

Growing popularity of software defined storage

Software defined services (SDS) involves a form of storage virtualization that separates software services, such as data management, data protection, placement of data, and I/O capabilities, from physical storage infrastructure. It increases flexibility, scalability, and automation capabilities of enterprise SAN storage infrastructure. The demand for efficient management of enterprise storage has increased worldwide and it has resulted in an increased demand for SDS. It is expected to witness robust demand during the forecast period as it reduces overall storage costs, enhances resource pooling, and automates management in the SAN storage infrastructure.

Cost effectivity offered by flash-based storage devices

Flash storage offers greater efficiency compared to the traditional HDD storage device. Currently, the cost of flash-based SAN storage is several times greater than that of HDD-based SAN storage. Vendors are continuously decreasing their product prices because of increased demand for storage in the market.

Due to the increased user-access needs, the performance of flash-based SAN storage arrays is 40 times better than hard disk I/O (input/output). Because of the higher-cost involved in procuring flash-based SAN storage systems, it anticipated to experience a higher growth only in large data centers. However, the price of these systems is likely to drop by 5-10% year-over-year, thus facilitating its adoption rate through 2020. The overall market will experience steady growth with the adoption of flash and traditional storage systems, with flash adding more revenues to the overall SAN data storage market through the forecast period.

Unified storage systems: the future of SAN solution

During the forecast period vendors in the storage market are expected to introduce many hybrid SAN-NAS solutions. Through these solutions, businesses can merge block and file-based data onto a common array. These systems support file, as well as block-based protocols, such as FC and NFS, and HDD and flash-based storage drives. Although, SAN-NAS architecture is considered more complex compared to individual implementations, it is likely to become more simplified in the future to meet the increased demands of enterprises. Thus, through these initiations, enterprises will no longer depend on one architecture for their changing requirements in the coming years.

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Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

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