
Forecast: Data Growth May Outpace Virtualization
Capabilities
In a typical customer environment, storage administrators must provide increasing levels of storage capacity
and improve performance while data continues to grow daily. To cope with this data growth, IT departments
add servers and rely increasingly on virtualization to manage capacity without adding more physical hardware.
Figure 1 shows the annual growth rate of data storage. Businesses from small to large are adding production
servers at a rapid pace. While large organizations are the most likely to be growing their storage at the fastest
rate, over one-third of businesses with under 100 production servers are still increasing the number of servers
under management by 11 to 20 percent annually.
2
Thus, as data continues to grow, storage grows as well, and
virtualization can only go so far in controlling the amount of hardware required to cope with the onslaught.
Figure 1. Approximate Annual Growth Rate of Total Amount of Data Storage (by number of production
servers/percent of respondents)
24%
26%
5%
3%
5%
7% 7% 7%
24%
21%
7%
24%
18%
34%
9%
5%
9%
36%
18%
37%
21%
3%
21%
24%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
1% to 10% annually 11% to 20%
annually
21% to 30%
annually
31% to 40%
annually
41% to 50%
annually
More than 50%
annually
Less than 25 production servers (N=222) 25 to 100 production servers (N=187)
More than 100 production servers N=96) Total (N=505)
Source: Medium-Size Business Server & Storage Priorities, Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, June 2008,
By Mary Johnston Turner and John McKnight, with Jennifer Gahm
2
Ibid, p. 21.
3
Komentáře k této Příručce