Enterprises have a plethora of storage infrastructure options to choose from in 2019. There are traditional storage technologies, for example, SAN and NAS; public and hybrid cloud storage; software-defined storage; and hyper-converged storage. Each technology has its strengths and weaknesses and is better-suited to specific use cases and applications, depending on the performance, access and cost considerations of an organization.

DataCore Software Corp.'s seventh annual The State of Software-Defined Storage, Hyperconverged and Cloud Storage market survey of 400 IT professionals illustrated how much progress hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has made in this competitive environment -- with a little more than half of those surveyed having implemented hyper-converged storage in some manner. And while far more respondents have already standardized on software-defined storage (37%) than hyper-converged storage (21%), both are being considered almost equally for future deployments. Approximately one-third of those surveyed are strongly considering software-defined storage and HCI, respectively, while about one-quarter said they plan to consider each for deployment in the next six to 12 months.