Storage

With the rise of the data economy, companies large and small need to securely store, manipulate and share ever-larger amounts of data, driving the storage market from strength to strength.

NAND/DRAM flash storage has been one of the clear winners, overtaking aftermarket sales of HDDs through European distributors in 2016. Faster, lighter and more reliable, flash-based storage is better-adapted to next-generation workloads such as AI, machine learning, and IoT. Consequently, the enterprise-storage infrastructure refresh cycle is increasingly characterised by the displacement of traditional disk-based systems, especially as prices come closer to parity. HDDs, however, are still considerably cheaper on a per GB basis, so cost-conscious CTOs and consumers are likely to continue to favour them for uses that are not performance sensitive.

Growth in the storage market is also being driven by demand for cloud solutions. Hardware vendors have therefore pivoted their offerings towards more comprehensive system/software solutions with enhanced, software-defined, data-management capabilities built in. This is part of an overarching trend, as the focus of the enterprise sector shifts from components to converged/hyperconverged systems which define storage, computing, and networking parameters.

You can benchmark your performance in this complex evolving market with CONTEXT business analytics, which are built on a representative dataset of sales through distributors in EMEA.