FRAMINGHAM, Mass., September 30, 2008 – The continued explosion in creation and storage of unstructured data and the need to generate more copies of data for availability, analytics, and archiving will be primary drivers of new storage system developments over the next five years. The most significant new development in storage consumption, however, is the emergence of "content depots" as a major consumer of enterprise disk storage capacity. These content depots are primarily in the business of gathering, organizing, and providing access to large quantities of digital content. According to a new study from IDC, these content depots will consume 17.4% of new enterprise disk storage capacity shipped in 2008, but only account for 5.1% of all spending, reflecting their focus on deploying storage solutions at very low costs.

"By the end of 2008, content depots are poised to become major consumers of storage capacity, major influencers of new storage systems design, and major disruptors of existing storage systems business models," said Richard L. Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC. "More so, many traditional organizations will evaluate the adoption of similar storage solutions for new applications that archive large amounts of unstructured data."

Storage systems and software suppliers must rethink existing sales and marketing strategies to better match changing customer bases, and also address the fast-expanding and increasingly diverse storage needs of these customers through a number of technology initiatives, including:

• Improving data access rates, server provisioning, data reliability, and energy consumption with new HDD and solid state storage technologies

• Adding significant compute capacity on storage platforms (serverization)

• Delivering cluster file systems and supporting information management facilities for organizing, discovering, and managing large unstructured data archives

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