Storage now more software than hardware, says Meta

The last year has seen only "incremental" advances in storage technology and those that are happening are in the area of software for storage management.

That's according to the latest industry snapshot by analyst house Meta Group, which in a research note dashes hopes for complete heterogeneous management capabilities - "actual functionality is often quite limited" still, it says.

An area of more promise would seem to be information lifecycle management, covering areas such as archive and retrieval, interoperability and adaptive storage resource management.

Over the next year like-for-like price/capacity will improve 35 per cent, Meta reckons, but hardware will be "rendered a tiered commodity". That may be good news for user organisations but is a challenge for traditional storage vendors, though most now have established software businesses.