This IDC study assesses the results of IDC's 2012 Trends in Storage and Virtualized Environments Survey conducted in the first calendar quarter of 2012. Storage is a tremendously important subsystem that can determine the success of a virtualization implementation. Capacity growth and application performance continue to be the top challenges facing organizations of all sizes as they relate to how storage is attached to x86 virtualized environments.

"IDC's survey continues to show a tremendous diversity in the way users deploy storage in virtualized x86 environments. We are seeing a trend indicating that Ethernet-connected storage is growing steadily and that DAS is the leading choice for desktop scenarios. Issues of capacity growth, performance, security, and protection continue to be top of mind, and adoption of advanced functionality to help solve these problems increases year over year. A big change in recent years is the rise in multi-hypervisor adoption, something that storage vendors need to continue to add support and optimization for," says Gary Chen, research manager, Cloud and Virtualization System Software.