This IDC Presentation analyzes the results of United States–based survey of storage end users that currently deploy or plan to deploy storage and/or data efficiency technologies in their datacenters. In total, six categories of storage and data efficiency technologies were analyzed: thin provisioning, storage tiering, storage virtualization, data compression, data deduplication, and thin replication. The survey was focused on economic benefits of the deployment of these technologies in form of reduced spending of storage hardware. More detailed survey results are available through IDC's special study Economic Benefits of Storage and Data Efficiency Technologies.

"Implementation of storage and/or data efficiency technologies proved to deliver significant benefits to end users — from both spending and managed storage capacity perspectives," says Natalya Yezhkova, research director, IDC's Storage Systems program. "Economic pressure and data management are two major forces behind adoption of these technologies. As end-user awareness of efficiency technologies increases and wider variety of products become available, adoption spreads across the market — starting from large organizations and going all the way down to small businesses."