The demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a rate of nearly 60% per year and IDC believes that during 2008, the industry will see significant shifts in the way data is stored, managed, and protected. The overarching theme of storage efficiency will intensify throughout 2008 and increase the industry's focus on virtualisation strategies and green initiatives as well as information consolidation techniques like deduplication.

"In the past several years, storage trends have tended to be tactical and focused on developments in specific technologies," said Benjamin S. Woo, vice president, Enterprise Storage Systems at IDC. "2008 is likely to represent an inflection point in the way applications and storage will be interfaced."

IDC's key predictions for 2008 include, Online storage services (storage-as-a-service) such as online backup, archiving, and replication will be accepted as a viable option; New role-based storage systems will enable vendors to target specific storage and data management issues, but will require tighter integration between the content-generating application and storage layer; Solid state disks will become more viable for mainstream storage solutions as a result of declining price points; And Virtual servers (e.g., VMware) will emerge as the killer application for iSCSI; Vendors will create more attractive "all in one" solutions, using an integrated server and storage approach to address the lucrative SMB market.