This IDC Presentation describes the sea changes to storage systems infrastructure that are occurring under most people's radar as a few of the largest end-user organizations spend more for storage and deal with steadily increasing terabytes. The increasing pain from high operational costs, relatively static functions, and limited application awareness are already driving these leadership buyers to think beyond SANs. This presentation highlights IDC's latest demand-side (user) research insights on storage in tomorrow's datacenter. It examines the three emerging stages of storage development that will soon be driving more and more storage systems buyers into grid-based, virtualized storage infrastructure. Readers can learn the key unfulfilled promises of SANs and the benefits and outcomes buyers want to pay vendors to supply.

This presentation was originally given at CeBIT on March 10.