We’re now in the process of putting the finishing touches on a new research brief on unified storage adoption and trends. I’ll share some with you here – subscribers can read the rest when the brief comes out (I’ll add a link when it gets published).  For the purposes of our research, we described unified storage as storage that supports both file-based/NAS and block-based/SAN storage.

Of the 338 respondents (North American and Western European storage professional in enterprise-level organizations - i.e. 1,000 or more employees) who replied to our unified storage  question, more than two thirds are at some point in the process of evaluating or implementing unified storage.  I am not surprised with that number – it makes sense that with the server virtualization, consolidation, and optimization efforts underway that users would also tackle storage unification and consolidation. 

It is also no surprise that there is a strong correlation between storage capacity and implementing unified storage – the more capacity, the more likely to unify and move away from storage stovepipes.  I do think the data that both vendors and users will find interesting is the primary approach users have taken or will take to unify storage – some 81% of users said that NAS gateways will play a role in unification. 

There is always speculation about the health of both EMC and NetApp’s NAS gateway businesses, especially from vendors that sell integrated unified storage.  Neither company breaks out business results for gateways, but based on what we hear from users, it has been pretty healthy.  A good part of the traction is that with gateways, you get to redeploy existing block-based resources in a more efficient manner.  And who doesn’t want more efficiency, especially nowadays?

Our research show unified storage has momentum, but it is still early.  Roughly half of the users we spoke to are still in the planning stage.  As over-used as the term “efficiency” is, data suggests that as a big part of the reason for implementing unified storage.  And though we didn’t ask about ease of use, you can bet that simplifying the storage environment is another reason.

Related posts:

1. More Storage Market Consolidation: LSI Acquires ONStor
2. Cloud Storage Enablement: Key to Commercial Cloud Storage Adoption
3. Enterprise NAS Requirements
4. NetApp – Has the Leopard Changed its Spots?
5. HP Buys IBRIX

Tags: Block, File, Multiprotocol, NAS, NAS Gateway, SAN, Storage, Unified