Users are focused on the time-to-market of their own products, so they want IT including storage resources, ready on time when they need them, which means flexible on-demand infrastructure, according to Lo. "They don't want to focus on hardware, but on provisioning for new projects, so that's why virtualization is a hot topic," he said.

Storage virtualization improves utilization enabling administrators to pool all storage into logical groups that can be reallocated quickly or in real-time based on demand," said Ko from HDS.

"Therefore, users' priorities are switching from acquiring additional storage to achieving better utilization of what they have. This is where array-based storage virtualization comes into play," added Ko.

Another strategy that responds to the customer needs for rapid provisioning is Autonomic Provisioning, which enables storage provisioning to be decided as a policy based on business rules. "So, instead of constantly monitoring IT projects and provisioning them individually, a policy relates storage to server activity, projects, operating systems and decisions on storage provisioning, so decisions can be made more or less automatically," said Lo.

A significant proportion of users are switching from outright purchase of storage arrays towards procurement of storage capacity under an on-demand financing scheme, said Gartner analyst Adam Couture. "The number of companies purchasing storage on an on-demand basis has risen dramatically during the past year-it will account for seven percent of storage acquisitions by 2008."