Will 2014 be the beginning of the end for "big storage"?

As another year turns, a new storage crisis looms on the horizon.  What did you budget for this year? Is your SAN running low on storage capacity, or is is it a performance problem this time around?  Or perhaps this is one of those rare years when you're just on the hook to re-up the contract that your vendor has you chained to.  However you look at it, if you're thinking about storage, you're probably planning to spend a heck of a lot more than you want to.  But what if you could cut your storage costs by 50%, while at the same time getting a scale-out, continuously available storage platform with auto-tiering?   And oh, by the way, wouldn't you like to implement something that was proven first in the Cloud and actually is bullet proof, but at the same time is something that you can implement on-premises with your existing skill-sets and resources?  Wouldn't it feel good to burn that service contract with your storage vendor? ... and know that you're actually making the best decision for your business.

It seems that 2014 is shaping up to be the year where big storage is finally disrupted.  Between technologies designed for huge data sets... like Amplidata’s Bitspread technology, and Microsoft's LRC erasure encoding, classic RAID technologies and many big storage vendor paradigms are ripe for disruption.  More than that, products like Microsoft Storage Spaces -  a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2 - were developed while building Azure, and the bits packaged in a way the real mid-sized Enterprises can use to cut their ties to with their existing storage vendors, and eliminate the "storage tax" through the use of off-the-shelf hardware and user-defined redundancy policies.

If you're interested in learning more, check out this article over on StackAccel and see if it can point you in a new direction.