Storage User Demand Study, 2012 Fall Edition: Many Uses of Internal Storage

Transcription

1 SURVEY Storage User Demand Study, 2012 Fall Edition: Many Uses of Internal Storage Natalya Yezhkova IDC OPINION Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F It is evident that most conversations about enterprise storage systems relate to external enterprise storage systems (i.e., systems deployed outside of a server). This is well justified as the latter is a well-established $26 billion market with its own trends and stakeholders. Another part of the storage market internal storage (i.e., storage within a server) is typically less discussed because of its historically smaller size and close ties with server applications. However, this segment shouldn't be underestimated. IDC's survey of storage administrators, completed in fall 2012 as IDC's Storage User Demand Study (SUDS) Survey, reveals the following: While servers with internal storage are most commonly used for typical server workloads, such as database, enterprise applications, and server, nearly half of the survey respondents also use some of servers deployed in their datacenters as standalone storage arrays or storage appliances. On average, approximately 10% of internal storage capacity deployed in corporate datacenters (excluding service provider hyperscale datacenters) is installed in servers dedicated to storing data. In addition, the extra embedded storage capacity in application servers is also broadly used as a shared pool through deployment of virtual storage appliance (VSA) software. While "top brand" software products, like those from Microsoft and Red Hat, will dominate the market of storage systems based on industry-standard off-the-shelf servers, penetration of products from smaller vendors, (e.g., Nexenta and Openfiler) will increase in the next 12 months, especially in regions outside the Americas. Filing Information: June 2013, IDC #241840, Volume: 1, Tab: Markets Storage Systems: Survey

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS In This Study 1 Methodology... 1 Situation Overview 2 Setting the Base: Deployments of Internal Storage... 2 Use Cases for Servers with Internal Storage... 3 Storage Software Platforms: Microsoft in the Lead, Smaller Vendors and Open Source Gaining... 7 Virtual Storage Appliances External Storage Data Use Cases Top Vendor Positioning Future Outlook 15 Storage Capacity: No Significant Shifts in Plans Testing Interest to Converged and Integrated Systems Average Useful Life of Storage Systems: High End and Scale Out Live the Longest Essential Guidance 18 Learn More 18 Related Research Appendix Survey Respondent Demographics How Are SUDS and Server/Storage Workloads Related to Each Other? Definitions Verticals Enterprise Storage System Data Use Cases Application Storage Class P # IDC

3 LIST OF TABLES 1 Top 3 External Enterprise Storage System Vendors by Select Data Use Case Based on Terabytes Shipped, 1H Top 3 External Enterprise Storage System Vendors by Select Data Use Case Based on Factory Revenue, 1H Server/Storage Workloads and SUDS Comparison Vertical Industry Categorization SUDS Data Use Cases by Group Examples of Storage System Families in Storage Class P 2013 IDC #241840

4 LIST OF FIGURES 1 Worldwide Internal Storage Systems Capacity Shipped Share by Region, Current Use of Internal Storage Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Various Use Cases Currently and in the Next 12 Months Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Storage-Specific Use Cases Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Region Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Various Use Cases by Company Size Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Medium-Sized Businesses Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Large Businesses Status of Adoption of Virtual Storage Appliance Products Currently and in the Next 12 Months Adoption of Select Virtual Storage Appliance Products Currently and in the Next 12 Months Distribution of External Enterprise Storage Capacity Shipped Among Three Data Use Case Groups, 1H Plans to Deploy and Retire External Enterprise Storage Systems in the Next 12 Months by Storage Capacity Plans to Purchase Storage Systems in the Next 12 Months by System Type Average Useful Life of Enterprise Storage Systems by Class Respondents by Region Respondents by External Storage System Capacity Deployed Respondents by Company Size Most Used Applications: Mission Critical Versus Non Mission Critical SUDS to Workloads Mapping P # IDC

5 IN THIS STUDY This IDC study provides analysis of the results of IDC's biannual worldwide survey of storage administrators. The most recent survey was completed in November 2012 and focused on data use cases for storage deployed within application or generalpurpose servers. The results of the previous survey, conducted in spring/summer 2012, were published in Storage User Demand Study, 2012 Spring Edition: End Users Test Different Ways of Using Solid State Storage (IDC #238127, December 2012). Methodology In the second half of 2010, IDC launched a project, Storage User Demand Study, or SUDS, whose main goal was to analyze current and future trends in end-user deployments of storage systems in support of major enterprise applications and a variety of data types. This study expands IDC's traditional vendor-centric assessment of the storage market from the perspective of product shipments and vendors' strategies. The cornerstone of SUDS is the survey of storage administrators across multiple regions. The most recent survey discussed in this IDC study was conducted in fall 2012 and surveyed 1,005 respondents in 17 countries in eight languages. The Appendix provides more details on respondent demographics. Besides the questions carried from survey to survey for historical trending, each SUDS Survey has a block of questions related to a specific storage technology or solution. Use of internal storage (i.e., storage deployed within application or generalpurpose servers shipped with three or more hard disk drives or solid state drives) was a focus of the most recent survey. Results of this part of the survey are also analyzed in this document. In addition to analyzing the survey results, IDC also develops quantitative estimates of how much storage shipped by top storage system suppliers was sold in support of specific data use cases, which include: A number of major enterprise applications, such as Oracle applications, SAP, MS Exchange, and SharePoint Groups of special applications like those designed for business intelligence/analytics or implemented only by end users in specific vertical industries (e.g., PACS in healthcare or CAD/CAM in manufacturing) Various IT infrastructure segments, such as home directory, virtual server, and virtual desktop Storage deployed by content depots for managing vast amounts of fixed content or by public cloud service providers for providing storage-related service offerings 2013 IDC #

6 Quantitative assessments are not included in this study, although the relative ranking of the top 3 vendors in each data use case category is provided. Note: All numbers in this document may not be exact due to rounding. SITUATION OVERVIEW Historically, for many years, the enterprise storage systems market was primarily associated with disk-based storage arrays built by a dozen tier 1 vendors or a larger group of small suppliers that were focused on a particular technological innovation in storage or on developing systems for needs of particular industries. However, in the past few years, the enterprise storage systems market has gone through a major transformation as new developments disturb the industry at multiple interrelated levels: Delivery model. Explosive growth of public and private cloud storage offerings is one of the biggest drivers behind changes in the storage systems industry. Not only do end users expand fulfillment of their storage needs beyond their datacenters and traditional offsite storage facilities into the cloud, but cloud service providers tend to put different demands on hardware they purchase focusing on new standards for scalability, management, and economics. New architectures. Originally designed for niche applications by start-up companies, architectures such as scale-out or object-based products are now becoming widely adopted by a variety of industries, while most top vendors have made acquisitions in this space to penetrate markets they couldn't penetrate with their traditional systems. Industry-standard servers. Expansion of scale-out architectures and growing availability and capabilities of industry-standard servers paved the path for development of software-based storage (i.e., storage systems created through deployment of software), which gives a general-purpose server "personality" of a storage system. The latter would not require any special hardware or experience and could be done by either an end user or a channel partner or even by a supplier of traditional storage systems (e.g., HP LeftHand appliances). IDC's SUDS Survey conducted in fall 2012 was focused on some aspects of the latter developments (i.e., on the use of general-purpose servers for storage-specific workloads). The sections that follow provide insights into the findings from this survey. Setting the Base: Deployments of Internal Storage According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 1Q13, 28% of all terabytes shipped with enterprise storage systems in 2012 were internal (i.e., shipped within application or general-purpose servers with three or more hard disk or solid state drives). Unlike external storage capacity, more than half of which is still shipped to end users in Americas, the distribution of internal storage capacity is more even between regions (see Figure 1). 2 # IDC

7 APEJ is leading the way in using more internal storage capacity as a proportion of the overall enterprise storage system terabytes: in 2012, 42% of enterprise storage system capacity shipped to APEJ users was internal. In comparison, this ratio falls into the 20 30% range in the United States, Western Europe, CEMA, and Canada. FIGURE 1 Worldwide Internal Storage Systems Capacity Shipped Share by Region, 2012 Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 1Q13 Use Cases for Servers with Internal Storage Servers are used for variety of workloads, from high-demanding databases to lowprofile file and print workloads. The purpose of the discussed survey, however, was to get more insight on deployments of general-purpose servers for storage-specific workloads. Figure 2 shows that while the vast majority of survey respondents use servers for traditional server use cases, such as running a database, running enterprise applications, and server, at least a third of them also have some servers dedicated to storage-specific use cases IDC #

8 FIGURE 2 Current Use of Internal Storage Q. What is a primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? n = 986 Note: Multiple responses were allowed. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 However, from the storage capacity perspective, penetration of storage use cases into the server infrastructure is lighter. Nearly 10% of internal storage capacity, on average, is used in configurations in which a server functions as a standalone storage array or an appliance or as a storage node in a modular/distributed storage system (see Figure 3). Another 11.5% of internal storage capacity is deployed in servers used as NAS or cloud gateways, or as storage virtualization appliances. These ratios remain similar in the next 12 months, with a slight drop for average share of internal storage capacity allocated to use cases beyond database, enterprise applications, or servers. 4 # IDC

9 FIGURE 3 Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Various Use Cases Currently and in the Next 12 Months Q. What is a primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases. Q. What will be the primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases in the next 12 months. n = 986 Note: The "dedicated to storage" category includes the following options: standalone storage array or storage appliance and storage node in a modular/distributed storage system. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 To put this into perspective, IDC estimates that more than 8EB of internal storage capacity was shipped by system OEMs in 2012, and 11EB will be shipped in This doesn't include capacity purchased by end users directly from HDD or SSD manufacturers or through other channels beyond system OEMs. On the regional side, respondents from APEJ use a higher share of their internal storage capacity in configurations dedicated to storage workloads than respondents from the Americas and EMEA. Moreover, they expect to dedicate an even higher share of internal storage capacity to storage-specific configurations, while respondents from the Americas and EMEA plan to decrease slightly the use of their servers as storage devices (see Figure 4) IDC #

10 FIGURE 4 Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Storage- Specific Use Cases Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Region Q. What is a primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases. Q. What will be the primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases in the next 12 months. Note: Means only for the following data use cases are taken into consideration: standalone storage array or storage appliance and storage node in a modular/distributed storage system. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 This survey doesn't reach large cloud service providers, which tend to built storage infrastructure by themselves or using original design manufacturers. In this case, storage systems are built of industry-standard components, typically x86 servers. Thus IDC believes that the allocation of internal storage capacity is fairly different for these service provider datacenters compared with traditional datacenters, mostly covered by the SUDS Survey. Small businesses (organizations with <100 employees in the United States or with <50 employees in other countries) were another category of end users with intentionally light representation in the survey. However, from other research, IDC sees that small organizations are more likely to have their entire compute and storage infrastructure centered on servers, unlike larger organizations, which have a stronger split between server and storage infrastructures. As a result, and it's confirmed by the SUDS Survey, small organizations use and will continue to use more internal storage capacity in general-purpose servers (also called file and print) than in servers that were transformed into storage arrays or nodes by deployment of storage software (see Figure 5). 6 # IDC

11 FIGURE 5 Average Allocation of Internal Storage Capacity to Various Use Cases by Company Size Q. What is a primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases. Q. What will be the primary use of the servers on which internal storage is deployed? Please try to estimate percentage of internal storage capacity within these server systems used for particular use cases in the next 12 months. n = 986 (by company size: small businesses, n = 51, medium-sized businesses, n = 411; large businesses, n = 524) Note: The "dedicated to storage" category includes the following options: standalone storage array or storage appliance and storage node in a modular/distributed storage system. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 Storage Software Platforms: Microsoft in the Lead, Smaller Vendors and Open Source Gaining There are plenty of storage software platforms available on the market for deployment on industry-standard servers and defining server "personality" as storage. IDC's SUDS Survey results show that Microsoft Storage Server is a clear leader in this space among the respondents. However, results also reveal that end users often use multiple storage software platforms on their servers, and while top platforms are expected to keep the leading positions, the adoption of offerings from smaller vendors like Nexenta and open source solutions like Openfiler will be noticeably increasing in the next 12 months, with some gain also expected for Red Hat Storage Server and Open-E Data Storage Software (see Figure 6) IDC #

12 FIGURE 6 Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months Q. What storage software platforms run on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Q. What storage software platforms will run on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Note: Multiple responses were allowed. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 Midsize businesses are expected to drive higher adoption of almost all storage software platforms included in this survey. At the same time, large businesses are also expected to play an important role in the growing adoption of Openfiler and even more so NexentaStor (see Figures 7 and 8). Respondents from small businesses are excluded from this analysis because of their intentionally low sample size. 8 # IDC

13 FIGURE 7 Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Medium- Sized Businesses Q. What storage software platforms run on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Q. What storage software platforms will run on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Notes: Multiple responses were allowed. Medium-sized businesses are defined as companies with employees worldwide. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall IDC #

14 FIGURE 8 Adoption of Storage Software Platforms Currently and in the Next 12 Months by Large Businesses Q. What storage software platforms runs on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Q. What storage software platforms will run on servers that function as storage nodes or standalone storage arrays? Notes: Multiple responses were allowed. Large businesses are defined as companies with 1,000+ employees worldwide. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 Virtual Storage Appliances As adoption of server virtualization spreads, virtualization platforms deliver more and more functions that help end users to increase efficiency of server resources. Virtualization of available storage capacity within servers is one of such functions. The competitive landscape in this segment is not as crowded as in other storage segments, with VMware vsphere and HP LeftHand VSA being the most known virtual storage appliance products. 10 # IDC

15 Respondents to the SUDS Survey demonstrated a high level of awareness and decent level of adoption of VSA solutions (see Figure 9). FIGURE 9 Status of Adoption of Virtual Storage Appliance Products Currently and in the Next 12 Months Q. Is all or part of storage capacity within the servers used in a shared storage pool through implementation of virtual storage appliance software? Q. Will all or part of storage capacity within the servers be used in a shared storage pool through implementation of virtual storage appliance software? Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 Figure 10 shows the rate of adoption of various VSA products by respondents who currently deploy VSA and respondents who plan to deploy VSA offerings in the next 12 months. As expected, VMware vsphere and HP VSA offerings were the top 2 adopted products now and in the next 12 months, with a slight increase in adoption for HP virtual storage appliance products. Adoption of other two offerings in this space, NetApp ONTAP-V and Nexenta VSA, was expected to remain relatively low IDC #

16 FIGURE 10 Adoption of Select Virtual Storage Appliance Products Currently and in the Next 12 Months Q. What virtual storage appliance software is used for sharing internal storage resources? Q. What virtual storage appliance software will be used for sharing internal storage resources? Note: Multiple responses were allowed. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 External Storage Data Use Cases Top Vendor Positioning With every SUDS project, IDC estimates how many terabytes of external storage systems were shipped in support of top enterprise applications and support of IT infrastructure and revenue of top storage system suppliers associated with these shipments. In fall 2012, IDC estimated that just under half of the external storage system capacity shipped in the first half of 2012 was shipped in support of major enterprise applications (see the full list of applications in the Appendix), slightly under 40% for major segments of IT infrastructure support (which includes home directory, virtual desktop, and virtual server infrastructure as well as content depots and public cloud infrastructure), and 12% for other data use cases (see Figure 11). 12 # IDC

17 FIGURE 11 Distribution of External Enterprise Storage Capacity Shipped Among Three Data Use Case Groups, 1H12 Note: Estimates are modeled based on the numbers published in the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, SUDS Survey results, and other IDC research. Source: IDC, 2013 Table 1 provides insights into ranking of top enterprise storage system suppliers in various data use case categories based on storage system capacity shipped in support of these data use cases in the first half of The ranking remained largely unchanged from that for the full year of 2011 (see Storage User Demand Study, 2012 Spring Edition: End Users Test Different Ways of Using Solid State Storage, IDC #238127, December 2012). EMC kept its lead in almost all segments, followed by NetApp, which was ranked second in all segments except in content depots and public cloud infrastructure in which it was ranked once again number 1 supplier of enterprise storage system capacity. EMC also appeared in the top 3 list in the latter category. HP and IBM ranked third in most categories, with HP holding the number 2 position in Microsoft SharePoint and content depots and public cloud infrastructure segments. For factory revenue, the ranking looks slightly different, with more ties for the number 2 position caused by variations in system pricing and class of systems shipped into particular data use cases (see Table 2). EMC got the first ranking in all categories except content depots and public cloud infrastructure, in which it was in the second position after HP and tied with NetApp. NetApp also moved down in ranking in Microsoft SharePoint compared with its position in the shipped terabytes ranking, while IBM moved up in ranking in several categories as a seller of higher-end systems IDC #

18 TABLE 1 Top 3 External Enterprise Storage System Vendors by Select Data Use Case Based on Terabytes Shipped, 1H12 Rank Business Intelligence and Analytics Microsoft Exchange Microsoft SharePoint Oracle Applications SAP Home Directory VDI and Virtual Server Industry- Specific Applications Content Depots and Public Cloud Infrastructure 1 EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC NetApp 2 NetApp NetApp HP, NetApp (tie) NetApp NetApp NetApp NetApp NetApp HP 3 IBM HP Hitachi, IBM (tie) IBM HP, IBM (tie) HP, IBM (tie) IBM Dell, EMC (tie) VDI = virtual desktop infrastructure Note: Ranking is based on IDC's estimates of external enterprise storage system capacity shipped in support of specific data use cases. Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 2Q12, and SUDS Survey, 2012 TABLE 2 Top 3 External Enterprise Storage System Vendors by Select Data Use Case Based on Factory Revenue, 1H12 Rank Business Intelligence and Analytics Microsoft Exchange Microsoft SharePoint Oracle Applications SAP Home Directory VDI and Virtual Server Industry- Specific Applications Content Depots and Public Cloud Infrastructure 1 EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC EMC HP 2 NetApp HP, NetApp (tie) HP, IBM (tie) IBM, NetApp (tie) IBM, NetApp (tie) NetApp NetApp NetApp EMC, NetApp (tie) 3 IBM HP HP, IBM (tie) IBM IBM VDI = virtual desktop infrastructure Note: Ranking is based on IDC's estimates of external enterprise storage system factory revenue for systems shipped in support of specific data use cases. Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 2Q12, and SUDS Survey, # IDC

19 FUTURE OUTLOOK Storage Capacity: No Significant Shifts in Plans Respondents to IDC's fall 2012 SUDS Survey shared slightly more positive plans on external storage capacity purchases for the next 12 months compared with the spring 2012 survey respondents (see Figure 12). However, shifts were not significant. While a slightly higher percentage of respondents are planning to purchase new storage capacity and remove old capacity from service, there were no changes on plans for purchasing substantial amounts of capacity (>10TB). FIGURE 12 Plans to Deploy and Retire External Enterprise Storage Systems in the Next 12 Months by Storage Capacity Q. How many terabytes of external storage systems is your organization planning to deploy within the next 12 months? Q. How many terabytes of external storage systems is your organization planning to retire (remove from service) within the next 12 months? Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 and spring 2012 On average, respondents planned to remove 16% of currently deployed external storage system capacity. This ratio was in line with the spring survey results and slightly lower than 18% from the previous year's survey. Respondents from North America were most cautious, with more than half of 324 respondents indicating that they plan to remove no storage capacity from service, and a quarter of respondents 2013 IDC #

20 planned to buy no storage capacity in the next 12 months. On the other end of the spectrum, respondents from APEJ continued to be the most active in terms of storage capacity purchasing and retirement: 94% of 223 respondents plan to buy some storage capacity in the next 12 months, and 68% plan to remove some capacity from service during the same period. Testing Interest to Converged and Integrated Systems Adoption of converged infrastructures and integrated systems is one of the trends IDC started observing as more vendors offer end users a variety of solutions that integrate multiple hardware components (servers, storage, and networking), common system management software and, in the case of integrated solutions, software to run specific applications. IDC's SUDS Survey revealed end users' moderate plans to purchase these classes of systems in the next 12 months, with more interest to converged (19.9% of respondents) than integrated (16.9% of respondents) systems (see Figure 13; see the Appendix for the complete definition of storage system types provided to survey respondents). FIGURE 13 Plans to Purchase Storage Systems in the Next 12 Months by System Type Q. What type of storage systems you plan to purchase from the storage system vendors in the next 12 months? n = 638 Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 Respondents from emerging regions (APEJ, CEMA, and Latin America) were most interested in purchasing converged and integrated systems, with 25 30% of respondents expressing interest in purchasing converged and 15 30% interested in purchasing integrated systems in the next 12 months. At the same time, only 10% of 16 # IDC

21 respondents from North America and 16% of respondents from Western Europe said they were planning to buy converged systems. For integrated systems, the percentage of interested respondents was even lower 8% in both North America and Western Europe. As with other new solutions on the storage systems market, we often see that end users from emerging regions less tied to legacy infrastructure and processes tend to be quicker in adopting or at least trying these new solutions. Likewise, large businesses, which usually have more technological expertise than midsize organizations and are constantly searching for efficient solutions, tend to be early adopters of new solutions and technologies. The survey shows that the same is true with converged and integrated systems: around 20% of respondents from large businesses and around 15% of respondents from midsize organizations said that they plan to buy converged or integrated systems in the next 12 months. Average Useful Life of Storage Systems: High End and Scale Out Live the Longest Although scale-out systems are not adopted at as high rates as traditional midrange and high-end systems, they are expected to be among the longest-living systems (see Figure 14). The nature of scale-out systems plays a key role in the long useful life cycles as system modules can be replaced and updated with no or minimal interruption for system operations. For traditional systems, the useful life is well correlated with the system class. More complex and strategic business high-end systems deployed for business-critical applications tend to stay on the floor for longer periods of time, while simpler and tactical entry-level systems live shorter lives on average. FIGURE 14 Average Useful Life of Enterprise Storage Systems by Class Q. What is an average useful life of storage systems in your organization? Please provide an answer by a system class. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall IDC #

22 ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE IDC's fall 2012 SUDS Survey revealed several important points on how end users deploy their storage resources, in particular resources available to them through storage capacity installed within general-purpose and application servers. Although these servers continue to be used predominantly for particular server applications, IDC sees that industry developments will lead to higher adoption of general-purpose industry-standard servers for purely storage use cases (for a detailed discussion, see IDC's Worldwide Software-Based (Software-Defined) Storage Taxonomy, 2013, IDC #240500, April 2013). We already see a number of top storage system suppliers focusing some of their messaging around software-defined storage strategies. At the same time, some smaller companies that offered their solutions to end users for a number of years already have the advantage of recognition, especially, as survey results suggest, outside of the Americas. However, this advantage might be threatened in the longer term by formal entry of the top vendors into this market. LEARN MORE Related Research Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Forecast: Customer Landscape Is Changing, Defining Demand for New Solutions (IDC #241033, May 2013) IDC's Worldwide Software-Based (Software-Defined) Storage Taxonomy, 2013 (IDC #240500, April 2013) IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platform Tracker Taxonomy, 2013 (IDC #240312, April 2013) New and Growing Channels for Storage Industry Terabyte Shipments (IDC #239953, March 2013) The Copy Data Problem: An Order of Magnitude Analysis (IDC #239875, March 2013) Appendix Survey Respondent Demographics Figures provide details on the demographics of respondents to IDC's fall 2012 SUDS Survey and their categorization of major enterprise applications as critical versus noncritical. 18 # IDC

23 FIGURE 15 Respondents by Region Note: Respondents are from 17 countries. Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 FIGURE 16 Respondents by External Storage System Capacity Deployed Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall IDC #

24 FIGURE 17 Respondents by Company Size Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall # IDC

25 FIGURE 18 Most Used Applications: Mission Critical Versus Non Mission Critical n = 1,005 Source: IDC's SUDS Survey, fall 2012 How Are SUDS and Server/Storage Workloads Related to Each Other? The short answer to this question is that they are not. That said, the research is conducted in such a way that the results support both SUDS and server/storage workloads. Some basic differences are shown in Table 3. SUDS leverages a survey of storage administrators asking them about the way their organizations' storage is deployed and used. The enterprise storage systems team analyzes the survey results to provide a deep-dive look at storage systems deployments (from the SUDS Survey) versus storage systems shipments (as found in the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker and enterprise storage systems forecast). SUDS also looks at the deployment of storage for a select number of enterprise applications and IT infrastructure support segments. IDC research suggests that these data use cases make up for roughly 70% or more of the 2013 IDC #

26 applications deployed by enterprises and therefore are an acceptable proxy for how enterprises leverage deployed storage systems. Figure 19 illustrates how SUDS data use cases map against server/storage workload categories. TABLE 3 Server/Storage Workloads and SUDS Comparison Server/Storage Workloads SUDS Geographic reach of survey United States Worldwide (17 countries, 8 languages) Number of respondents 800 1,005 Type of survey respondent Server administrators Storage administrators Top-down/bottom-up approach Top down Bottoms up Technology focus Servers/compute Storage/data Source: IDC, 2013 FIGURE 19 SUDS to Workloads Mapping Source: IDC, # IDC

27 Definitions Verticals Table 4 shows key subindustries included in the primary vertical markets. TABLE 4 Vertical Industry Categorization Vertical Finance Communications and media Construction Consumer and recreational services Discrete manufacturing Government Healthcare providers Insurance Private education Process manufacturing Professional services Public education Resources Retail Securities and investment services Transportation and transportation services Service providers/telecommunications/cable Utilities Wholesale Examples Banking, insurance, financial services, credit institutions Publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications Heavy construction and special trade contractors Services focused primarily on the consumer such as hotels, entertainment services, and social services Automotive, apparel, furniture, equipment/machinery, publishing, electronics, leather Local, state, federal Hospitals, outpatient services, physician office, medical testing Healthcare insurance payers, life insurance, property and causality, brokers, and other insurance Private elementary and secondary education, private colleges and universities, other private organizations providing educational services Food, paper, petroleum/chemicals/pharmaceutical, stone/clay/glass, primary metals Business, legal, engineering, management, IT, real estate, or Internetrelated services Educational services and library/archives Fuel extraction, agriculture, mining, and other extractive industries Eating and drinking establishments The variety of institutions that facilitate and execute capital transfers Trucking and warehousing, rail, water, and other support activities such as air control and towing Cable, satellite, and telecommunications service providers Sanitary services Import and export business Source: IDC, IDC #

28 Enterprise Storage System For the purposes of the SUDS Survey, an enterprise storage system is defined as a system of three of more hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid state drives (SSDs) dedicated to storing data. The system might be located within a server cabinet or enclosure (internal storage) or might be a standalone system either on a network (Ethernet or Fibre Channel) or connected directly to servers. Storage on desktops, laptops, and workstations, as well as external standalone drives or storage devices with one or two disk drives, are not included in this definition. Data Use Cases Table 5 outlines data use cases covered by SUDS and groups them into three categories: major enterprise application support, IT infrastructure support, and "other." TABLE 5 SUDS Data Use Cases by Group Data Use Case Group Data Use Case Major enterprise application support MS Exchange MS SharePoint Oracle Applications SAP Storage dedicated to business intelligence/business analytics Industry-specific application (e.g., PACS, CAD/CAM, GIS) IT infrastructure support Home directory Virtual infrastructure support (virtual server and VDI) Content depots and public cloud infrastructure Other Other Source: IDC, 2013 Application Oracle Applications For the "application" entitled Oracle Applications, respondents were advised to include Oracle applications such as ERP and CRM. 24 # IDC

29 Cloud Service Infrastructure In SUDS, one of the "applications" about which we surveyed is called cloud service infrastructure. Respondents were instructed that "if your organization provides storage services to other organizations, please include the storage capacity dedicated to providing these services into 'cloud service infrastructure.' " Industry Specific For the "application" entitled industry specific, respondents were advised that examples of this type of "application" included PACS and CAD. Storage Class In terms of future plans, the SUDS Survey provided examples of storage class. These examples are provided in Table 6. TABLE 6 Examples of Storage System Families in Storage Class Storage Class Traditional entry-level systems Traditional midrange systems Traditional high-end systems Scale-out systems Converged systems (general purpose-built systems with pre-integrated compute, storage, and networking components) Integrated systems (purpose-built systems with preintegrated compute and storage components) Third-party storage services Examples HP MSA P2000, Dell PowerVault MD, IBM DS3000, etc. EMC VNX, HP LeftHand P4000, Dell EqualLogic, etc. EMC VMAX, IBM DS8000, HDS VSP, etc. IBM XIV and SONAS, EMC Atmos, etc. EMC Vblock, NetApp FlexPod, HP CloudSystem, etc. HP E5000 messaging system, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, etc. Cloud Source: IDC, 2013 Synopsis This IDC study provides analysis of the results of IDC's Storage User Demand Study (SUDS) Survey completed in fall Conducted in countries across the globe, the survey focused on end-user deployments of external and internal enterprise storage systems for various data use cases including support for major enterprise applications and IT infrastructure IDC #

30 "It is very typical to talk about external storage systems (i.e., systems deployed outside of a server) in the context of enterprise storage in general. This is well justified given the size of this market over $26 billion and its own ecosystem," says Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems. "The other part of the enterprise storage market internal storage is typically downplayed. At the same time, nearly half of the respondents to the SUDS Survey indicated that they use some of the servers deployed in their datacenters as standalone storage arrays or storage appliances. While penetration rates into storage capacity are lower, the interest to this market is growing among top storage system suppliers, which will drive this penetration up in the future." Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2013 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved. 26 # IDC