In brief:
Organizations that need more storage capacity can’t just throw dollars at the problem. They face soaring equipment prices and supply chain disruptions that require new approaches to expanding capacity.
In the past, enterprise IT leaders could safely assume that storage was readily available if they needed to expand capacity.
Just a few years ago, organizations could expand cloud arrays, add flash capacity, refresh infrastructure, or shift workloads to cloud platforms to open up storage capacity for growing amounts of information.
But fast-forward to today, and the traditional tactic of simply throwing more cash at storage shortages doesn’t yield straightforward ROI.
New storage limits — fueled by supply chain shifts and dramatic increases in data generation — require different approaches to expanding storage capacity, not just additional dollars to purchase it. These new approaches include storage optimization, software-defined storage and building reliable IT partnerships. Organizations need to do more than buy their way out of the storage shortage problem.
New storage limits — fueled by supply chain shifts and dramatic increases in data generation — require different approaches to expanding storage capacity.
What is the storage squeeze?
The “storage squeeze,” is the gap between the amount of storage that organizations need and their ability to acquire, afford, and deploy that storage efficiently.
The squeeze dictates a careful balancing act. Organizations must weigh accelerating data growth with rising costs, constrained supply, and longer equipment procurement cycles. They also need to satisfy short-term capacity needs while building for longer-term objectives.
The right IT partner understands how the storage squeeze fits into a larger infrastructure equation, rather than simply selling solutions. They help organizations optimize today while planning for what’s next.
Recent research conducted by Omdia in partnership with SHI and that surveyed 400 IT professionals in North America highlights just how entrenched this problem has become and how central IT partners can be in resolving the challenge. Below we outline five insights derived from this research on why storage is becoming a strategic issue for enterprise IT and how to navigate today’s constrained environment.
Five key insights on the storage squeeze
1. Rising storage costs alongside growing data volumes
The research found that 67 percent of organizations reported increased costs for memory and storage components.
This isn’t surprising given the massive growth in data generation, which is expected to undergo a 22 percent jump in global data creation since just 2025.
Data explosion is only one source of higher storage costs. Higher infrastructure costs—including power, cooling, networking, and data center capacity—are also driving up the total cost of storing, managing, and accessing data. So too, as we discuss in the next section, volatility and constraints in the supply chain also contribute to higher storage prices.
Increasing pricing pressures force organizations to rethink how they store and manage data to balance growing demand with limited budgets.
Research indicates that 67 percent of organizations reported increased costs for memory and storage components.
2. Increasing supply constraints
The survey also indicated that 81 percent of organizations say that supply chain issues are having significant or moderate impact on operations.
There are several sources of supply chain pressure. Increased market volatility, heightened customer demands, changing trade dynamics, energy pricing, and resource scarcity, have made planning more complex than ever.
The research also indicates that organizations are proactively trying to address supply chain chokepoints. Many are looking to accelerate infrastructure purchases to secure equipment supply, with 39 percent fast-tracking storage purchases to ensure they have equipment and minimize uncertainty.
But for some organizations, spending more today may not be an option. As a result, many are pausing planned purchases and looking to optimize their existing infrastructure.
Some 39 percent of organizations are proactively trying to address supply chain chokepoints by fast-tracking storage purchases.
3. Optimizing existing infrastructure assets
Some 72 percent of organizations to the survey plan to moderately or significantly increase storage utilization rates before refreshing infrastructure. Given the rising costs and uncertainty in equipment supply, organizations need to extract greater value from existing infrastructure before committing to new investments. This includes storage, compute, networking, and data protection resources. Organizations can use a range of strategies to wring more value from existing assets, such as:
- Storage tiering: Automatically shifting inactive “cold” data to cheaper media while keeping active “hot” data on fast flash drives.
- Storage virtualization: Pooling physical resources from different vendors into a single, easily managed pool to eliminate silos.
- Consolidation: Replacing multiple underutilized, fragmented systems with fewer, high-density storage arrays.
4. A shift to software defined
According to the research, 82 percent of software-defined storage (SDS) users plan to increase their SDS spend in response to price increases and supply chain disruption. At the same time, software-defined approaches may not be the best choice for every workload. A partner like SHI can help determine whether these approaches suit your environment and, in fact, reduce cost.
Software-defined approaches provide elastic capacity without requiring immediate investment in memory, storage hardware, or data center expansion.
Organizations can thus extract additional value from existing infrastructure by pooling resources, improving utilization, automating management, and enabling storage to scale independently of hardware refresh cycles.
Software-defined approaches create feasible interim solutions to increase storage capacity as organizations adjust to the “new normal” of the supply chain. They are less fixed and can easily be deprecated once long-term hardware investments have been made. In the interim, organizations can extend usefulness of existing resources wait out current constraints, but start building for longer-term shifts, such as AI.
5. AI as a forcing function
More than three-quarters of survey respondents agree that AI places pressure on organizations’ storage capacity, budget, and associated resources. Further, 74 percent agree that the storage and memory shortage is slowing organizations’ ability to deploy AI infrastructure on-premises.
AI workloads are exposing infrastructure limitations. In traditional environments, these constraints were manageable. But increasingly they become ceilings as organizations train models, process large data sets, or support generative AI applications. With AI, there is not simply more storage consumption, but greater pressure on performance, bandwidth, and data management infrastructure throughout the entire environment.
This reality requires IT leaders to think beyond individual infrastructure purchases to focus on longer-term data center transformation and AI requirements. In many cases, the storage and memory shortage is serving as a catalyst for broader infrastructure modernization, encouraging organizations to assess whether their current environments can support the performance, scale, and resiliency demands that AI initiatives will require over the coming years.
In many cases, the storage and memory shortage is serving as a catalyst for broader infrastructure modernization.
As organizations accelerate AI, infrastructure decisions need to become more strategic. The right partner helps customers evaluate IT infrastructure requirements among storage, compute, networking, governance, and data architecture to support future AI workloads. Through infrastructure assessments, AI readiness services and hands-on validation, organizations build a scalable foundation for AI while avoiding unnecessary spending today.
Some 74 percent agree that the storage and memory shortage is slowing organizations’ ability to deploy AI infrastructure on-premises.
The storage squeeze as a business issue
AI has created unprecedented demand for data storage and processing. Meanwhile, global supply chain uncertainty, pricing volatility, and infrastructure availability constraints are making it more difficult to meet demand. These shifts have become entrenched, and companies need to find strategic, proactive ways to adjust.
Organizations that succeed in the wake of the storage squeeze won’t simply buy more storage. They will optimize what they already have, diversify architectural options, and build stronger supply-chain resilience into infrastructure strategies.
Organizations need a strategy, and often guidance, for modernizing. SHI helps customers assess their current environments, identify opportunities to optimize existing assets, provide access to an ecosystem of infrastructure vendors, and lay the foundation for performance, cost, and long-term scalability.
NEXT STEPS:
Read the full Omdia/SHI research report on the conducted by Omdia in partnership with SHI here.
Learn more about storage solutions from SHI.
Speak to an SHI expert about how to manage your storage squeeze.
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