Even as the overall cost of storage components has declined, storage capacity has increased by about 54% year over year. This rise in capacity is fueled in part by the increasing use of digital data such as graphics, photos, streaming video and audio content, and also by ubiquitous client applications such as email. Even the burgeoning trend toward server virtualization (24% increase year over year) requires an underlying storage infrastructure to support it.
Aberdeen research examines the efforts of storage vendors to address the demand for increased storage capacity while lowering storage power consumption, reducing the amount of cooling, and the amount of space required for storage in the data center.