Storage vendors have reacted angrily to predictions that the storage markets is about to collapse.

Last week Data Center Dynamics reported $46 billion could be wiped from the value of the IT storage market, as factors such as rising efficiency in data storing techniques and storage hardware commoditization would obviate the need for expensive proprietary platforms.

However, storage vendors say that critics such as Actifio founder Ash Ashutosh, are being too selective with their facts.

Virtualised storage vendor X-IO has refuted claims that demand for storage will drop dramatically as a result of new techniques.

“The year twenty whatever will be the year of falling storage requirements - how often have I heard that line,” said Gavin McLaughlin, X-IO’s VP of worldwide marketing.

While Actifio has some great technologies that cut the storage needs of certain datasets, there are many other examples which will contribute to a boom in the data centre’s storage demands, he argued. “There are many instances where de-duping, compression or patented hokey-cokey 2000 technologies make absolutely zero difference,” said McLaughlin, “worse still, they can sometimes make data centres much less efficient.”

“Storage is a necessity and it’s growing – full stop. I do wish vendors would stop with the self-serving marketing hype and show us statistics based upon real world scenarios,” he said.

However, even massive growth of data volumes will not stop some encumbent vendors becoming casualties, according to a spokeswoman for Nexenta, a software defined storage vendor that argues that hardware is now a cheap commodity. This will in turn have a massive effect on many data centres, which could be left with systems that become prematurely obsolete.

The explosion of data forced the industry to evolve, first through industry standards and then by innovation, which has led to a larger trend of commoditisation, according to Jill Orhun, Nexenta’s marketing VP. Orhun characterised the main casualties as the ‘MESS’ (massively expensive storage system) vendors. “Software-defined storage is something that can be downloaded and used on a large variety of hardware - the great majority of solutions in the market today would have a hard time meeting that basic criteria,” said Orhun, “And that tells you a lot about who will survive."