Industry experts agree that the size of the digital universe will double every two years at least, a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020. Data is being generated by both humans and machines at rates that require a radical rethinking of storage solutions. Modern storage needs to be scalable and flexible, yet still affordable.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is enjoying wider adoption because it meets these criteria. IDC projects that the SDS market will see a compound annual growth rate of 13.5 percent over the 2017-2021 forecast period, with revenues of nearly $16.2 billion in 2021. Enterprise storage spending is shifting from on-premises IT infrastructure toward private, public and hybrid cloud environments and from hardware-defined, dual-controller array designs toward SDS.
