According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), HDD shipments for enterprise applications will increase from 40.5 million units in 2009 to 52.6 million units in 2014. Moreover, the HDD industry will ship more Petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.

"We're definitely seeing intensive cost cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions," said John Rydning, research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk.

"The employment of technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, storage multitiering, and storage virtualization are all contributing to reducing end-user costs.

"Several ongoing trends will continue to impact enterprise HDD market revenue over the forecast period, including a continued shift away from higher cost performance-optimized HDDs to lower cost capacity-optimized solutions and solid state drives (SSDs) to complement HDDs in storage systems. HDD revenue derived from enterprise markets will grow at only a 1.7% CAGR during this time. Additionally, there will be an increased effort among end users to better utilize existing storage system assets.

Other key findings from IDC's research include the following:
The transition from 3.5in. to 2.5in. performance-optimized form factor HDDs will be complete by 2012
Growing interest in new storage delivery models such as storage as a service, or storage in the cloud is likely to put greater storage capacity growth demands on Internet datacenters
The price per gigabyte of performance-optimized HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25% to 30% per year.