“Storage Budgets Could Triple by 2027”: The Answer Is Intelligent Tiering and STaaS

The enterprise storage market is being reshaped. The direction of that reshaping is toward unifying block, file, and object data under a single control plane and handling AI workloads directly within storage. This is described as an In-place AI data platform type. According to EverPure, storage budgets could rise by as much as 3 times by 2027, and the company pointed to intelligent tiering and STaaS as the response.

Global IT market research firm Gartner released its report, "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms 2026." Gartner said the simultaneous effects of surging demand for AI infrastructure, shortages of memory components, and restructuring in the virtualization market are accelerating a paradigm shift in enterprise storage architecture.

As an extension of that shift, Gartner presented key forecasts for the enterprise storage market through 2029. It said STaaS as a share of Capex for on-premises storage infrastructure would expand from 25% in early 2026 to 50% in 2029.

Accordingly, STaaS is expected to double by 2029 from early 2026 levels. The forecast in the article headline that storage budgets could increase by as much as 3 times in 2027, along with the response of intelligent tiering and STaaS, was presented in line with this market reshaping trend.

The way unstructured data is managed is expected to shift from separately introducing dedicated storage for individual files and objects to a unified platform based on a single namespace. The share forecast for the shift to a unified platform based on a single namespace was given as 50% in 2025, rising to more than 80% in 2029.

At the same time, 70% of enterprises were forecast to build purpose-built AI storage tiers to support large-scale AI inference and RAG. The expected deployment rate of active cyber storage for real-time threat detection and defense within the data I/O path was given as 100%.

In addition, shortages of NAND flash and DRAM supply, along with price spikes caused by those shortages, were expected. As a result, there was a warning that enterprise infrastructure and operations teams need to increase storage budgets by as much as 3 times in 2027 compared with 2025.

The background to this major market shift was presented as 4 structural factors: supply chain volatility, the spread of production AI, hypervisor restructuring, and active cyber resilience.

With surging demand for AI infrastructure and enterprise SSD prices rising more than 15 times versus nearline HDD, it has become necessary to place high-density QLC all-flash at the first tier for active data lakes and connect large-capacity HDD and tape to warm and cold tiers. As a result, intelligent tiering architecture has become essential.

At the same time, as the computing bottleneck shifts to the storage layer, In-place AI technology, which directly executes metadata extraction, semantic tagging, and vector embedding within storage, has become important. This technology is aimed at reducing data transfer costs and has emerged as a core capability.

As virtualization license restructuring increases demand for workload migration, the need for independence from specific engines has grown. Compatibility assurance for Red Hat OpenShift, compatibility assurance for Nutanix AHV, and compatibility assurance for KubeVirt have become necessary, and flexibility in integrating alternative platforms has emerged as a key benchmark.

Standards in the security area have also changed. Real-time defense systems that detect abnormal encryption patterns at the storage level within 1 minute, apply immutable snapshot locks, and isolate hosts have become basic requirements, and PQC support has also become a basic requirement.

Gartner classified vendors in the 2026 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms by evaluating capabilities such as unified support for block, file, and object; a multicloud control plane; and AI telemetry functions.

As a result, 6 companies met the criteria for "Leaders," with strong execution and completeness of vision: Dell Technologies, EverPure, HPE, Huawei, IBM, and NetApp.

Hitachi Vantara was selected as a "Visionaries" company recognized for its technology vision and platform integration.

Gartner said clear execution strategies are needed to respond to the rapidly changing infrastructure environment. It also said companies should accelerate the shift to SLA-based STaaS contracts to reduce rising costs and technology obsolescence risk, and consider introducing In-place AI and intelligent decomposition architectures, which directly handle vectorization and metadata indexing at the storage layer, in order to minimize network transmission latency and cloud egress costs when building RAG and large-scale AI inference pipelines.

The speaker said hypervisor neutrality is needed to prevent dependence in virtualized environments and explained that the purpose is to avoid virtualization lock-in. The speaker also said real-time threat detection at the storage level is necessary, and proposed building a cyber storage system with active isolation and defense functions, emphasizing that these conditions should be built in as basic requirements.

Source: IT DAILY · Kwon Young-seok
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241183

References

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