The file- and object-based storage (FOBS) market revenues will reach $23 billion in 2013 and $38 billion in 2017, IDC said.
“FOBS solutions are much more versatile and will quickly outpace more rigid, hardware-based options,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, Storage Systems, IDC.
Scale-up solutions, including unitary file servers and scale-up appliances and gateways, will fall on hard times throughout the forecast period, experiencing sluggish growth through 2016 before beginning to decline in 2017.
Scale-out file- and object-based solutions – delivered either as software, virtual storage appliances, hardware appliances, or self-built for delivering cloud-based offerings – will grow at CAGR of 24.5 percent from 2012 to 2017.
Increased versatility will result in more diverse use cases for FOBS.
IDC’s senior research analyst Amita Potnis suggests that suppliers need to commit to making their platforms more compatible with server and desktop virtualization, in-place analytics and NoSQL databases.
DIY storage will become more prevalent over the forecast period, but commercial solutions will still garner strong demand.
Outside the data center, storage traffic is undergoing a dramatic shift as the growth of mobile, social, and cloud is heavily tilted toward the use of IP-based connectivity mechanisms for consuming storage resources.
Revenue for unitary host-based file servers is shrinking as businesses move to purpose-built platforms.
IDC says growth of object-based and object-oriented file system storage solutions for public cloud and private cloud archive environments will continue to outpace the market.
