Our seventh Expectation is that the introduction of storage hypervisors will allow users to enjoy similar savings in the storage systems market to those in the server market, where VMware has allowed Virtual Machines to run on a heterogeneous selection of physical servers. We show our forecast for storage systems and devices combined in Figure 10.
While there have been significant developments in the storage systems market in virtualised techniques involving snap shots and thin provisioning, users typically have to select a single vendor’s products to take advantage. There are already a handful of vendors promoting the use of storage hypervisors to allow arrays from multiple vendors to be attached to a users IT infrastructure.’ IBM, Virsto, Data Core and Falconstor are all promoting new approaches. In addition RedHat’s acquisition of Gluster and VMware’s own development of VASA also point to potential savings for users. You should watch EMC and NetApp during 2012 to see how these established major players react to the desire from users for a heterogeneous market.
Further Reading – See our analysis of IBM and Virsto in the storage hypervisor area
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Filed under: Storage Systems Tagged: | ITCandor, storage hypervisor
