IDC Makes Predictions for 2008

By Greg McNevin

January 8, 2008: The new year is well and truly underway now, and as business begins to ramp up to normal again the analysts at IDC have looked into their crystal balls and come up with a set of forecasts revolving around shifts in intensification of storage efficiency, virtualisation strategies, and green initiatives.

According to IDC, demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a rate of nearly 60 percent per year, and due to this it thinks that during 2008 the industry will see significant shifts in the way data is stored, managed, and protected.

2008 will see a focus on storage efficiency, increasing focus on virtualisation, information consolidation, data deduplication and other green initiatives.

“In the past several years, storage trends have tended to be tactical and focused on developments in specific technologies,” said Benjamin Woo, vice president of Enterprise Storage Systems at IDC. “2008 is likely to represent an inflection point in the way applications and storage will be interfaced.”

More specifically, the firm is predicting that 2008 will see online storage services such as online backup, archiving, and replication becoming more accepted, while solid state disks will become more viable for mainstream storage solutions thanks to diminishing price points.

It also foresees virtual servers such as VMware becoming the killer application for iSCSI, and vendors creating more attractive "all in one" solutions using an integrated server and storage approach for the SMB market.

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