We are conducting a study on the Storage Hypervisor market. Below are some details and we encourage anyone to contact us for more information.

Market settings

A large proportion of Customers’ IT assets are tied into disk arrays. We believe that storage hypervisors have similar potential to drastically change storage management just like server hypervisors did to servers. We have profiled the various vendor approaches IBM, Virsto, NetApp, FalconStor, DataCore, HDS and EMC. And we addressed the essentials to the storage hypervisor market showing that customers have different options.

Storage Hypervisor Demand Dynamic Study
The study was launched to assist the IT industry understand how the storage hypervisor market affects their businesses.
The following drivers/tensions determines how the storage market is affected by hypervisors:

• Customers want holistically managed storage
• The Storage Hypervisor “injects a virtualisation layer that supervises storage services across all customers’ IT assets”
• Four competing models are emerging as seen in the image on the right

Successful vendors will consider the following when setting out their strategy:

• Facilitating customers with end-to-end storage management
• Which messages and channels to bring across
• Optimal partnering and aggregation strategies
• Becoming the ‘VMware of storage hypervisors’

Study Phases
The study is designed around 4 main phases:

1. Kick-off – Market planning framework
2. Deployment case-studies – Case study and analysis early adopters and evaluators
3. Competitive analysis – Profiles and SWOT analysis of active vendors
4. Recommendations – Onsite presentation with sponsor management team – customised recommendations

Sponsors will receive both case study reports and a written review of their own market position with recommendations.
Demand and supply analysis
We believe case studies will provide most meaningful insights.
Early adopters can illustrate benefits realised and lessons learnt. Based on 10 case studies, this will be our first report. Evaluators will represent early majority behaviour and will be able to articulate drivers and inhibitors. Based on 20 case studies, this will be our second report.
Another demand dimension we intend to explore is differences between enterprise customers and service aggregators.
By including case study customer feedback, we will analyse supplier positioning
This third study will be a compilation of profiles and market trends.

Additional IP EXPO activities

Rainmaker Files in partnership with Imago Techmedia will be running three study related communications activities:

• Vendor CTO roundtable in London on 24th May 2012. Pre-launch sponsors may send up to two representatives to this dinner debate to discuss state of the storage industry, alliances and go-to-market partnerships.
• Press briefing on study results at IP EXPO on 17 October 2012. Pre-launch sponsors are entitled to one seat at the panel with full access to attending media.
• User roundtable with carefully selected Infrastructure Directors. Pre-launch sponsors are entitled to two seats at this roundtable.

For more information
Please contact us for more information contact us.

Deliverables in detail

You will receive research and analysis designed to provoke changes in direction. Our analysis and advise is delivered in a number of ways. In particular:

• Rainmaker Index Market Updates – annual market ratings for multiple suppliers according to our market assessment methodology
• Theme market studies – detailed market analysis and sizing in each of our six themes 6
• Opinion pieces – thought-provoking observations on market dynamics, segments, alliances, new opportunities, customer adoption and more; published publicly to foster debate
• Rainmaker Index Profiles – frequent event-driven updates of supplier positioning with assessment of performance in each of our 6 themes
• Vendor Profiles – access to our living library assessing key supplier business strategies and offerings

Recently published

• Data intelligence study – new DR services appeal to many more customers; Virtualisation enables fail-over, which in turn changes the DR landscape[ market size and forecasts of the growth of DR services provided in Cloud are included; published in July 2011
• Server Virtualisation study – how suppliers offering advanced virtualisation have succeeded to dominate the market and a statistical view of how virtual machines have overtaken the shipments of physical-only servers; published in July 2011.
• Storage Virtualisation study – a statistical view of how networked storage, both SAN and NAS, has increased and ideas on how advanced virtualisation helps suppliers succeed; published in October 2011.

Research agenda

As customers you will help to direct our research agenda and timing. We re-visit our themes on a rolling 12 months basis. Our current plans for 2012 include:

• IT operations study – products and services that help customers be more effective with operational management of their production environments; the first report compares maintenance offerings and approaches by established and emerging maintenance suppliers
• Go-to-market study – segmentation analysis to illustrate changing buyer demographics and psychographics; our first report examines the aggregator community, their priorities and buying preferences.
• Resource efficiency study – a look at power efficiency and Green strategies
• Generations study – a look at how suppliers are accommodating the changing influence of new generations joining the workforce

Rainmaker publishes cover 7 types of information – one for each of our six chosen themes as well as one for the Rainmaker Index (which includes a review of a superset of activities for the vendor across all relevant themes). Profiling is important because we use or skill and experience to score each supplier in parallel to our investigations, which in turn fuels the Rainmaker Index. We invite vendors to discuss their strategies with us in order to help us formulate our opinions from a good basis of knowledge. We publish research, guidance and findings at the study, theme and overall market participation levels, adding scores to use in the Rainmaker Index wherever appropriate.