Virtualisation initiatives are helping to drive "tremendous growth" in the data centre, it has been reported.

According to Casey Quillin, analyst at Dell'Oro Group, the adoption of consolidation techniques - along with cloud computing - is providing new and exciting opportunities in storage.

By virtualising their server infrastructures, businesses are able to cut up-front investment and the cost of managing and maintaining servers.

"In order to benefit from the inherent flexibility provided by the 'provisioning on demand' feature of server virtualisation, the storage available to these virtual servers also needs to be flexible and able to scale," Mr Quillin stated.

"SAN storage virtualisation has the potential to address these concerns and we expect fibre channel to realise a boost from this trend."

Additionally, he said cloud storage is generating interest as enterprises seek to realise the cost savings provided by outsourcing some of their storage needs to the cloud.

"This increasing demand is requiring cloud storage service providers to grow their storage infrastructure on a massive scale and we predict this to have a positive impact on fibre channel growth as well," Mr Quillin added.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Corporate IT Forum, 60 per cent of companies are using virtual servers to increase operational efficiencies.

Posted by Alex Boardman