storage-squeeze

Ann Arbor, MI, August 18, 2026 — VergeIO, the developer of VergeOS, today published Navigating the Great Enterprise Storage Squeeze, multi-client research conducted by Omdia and commissioned by VergeIO among 400 North American IT professionals with direct storage and infrastructure responsibility. Ninety-eight percent of those organizations are consolidating infrastructure layers or exploring it. Among organizations that do not run software-defined storage today, it ranks as the technology most commonly slated for significant investment in response to the shortage.

The research was fielded in May 2026. Seventy-six percent of respondents sit at senior management level or above, and their organizations range from 500 to more than 20,000 employees.

Prior storage shortages followed a familiar pattern. A flood, a fire, or an earthquake broke something, supply fell, prices spiked, and the industry rebuilt until the long slide in cost per terabyte resumed. Nothing broke this time. Supply creation sits at record levels and continues to rise. What changed is that hyperscalers building AI infrastructure walked into the market with budgets that have no practical ceiling and bought the industry’s output.

The public price record makes the scale plain. TrendForce put conventional DRAM contract prices up 90 to 95 percent in the first quarter of 2026 alone, a record, with enterprise SSD contract prices up 53 to 58 percent in the same quarter. Western Digital sold out its entire 2026 hard drive production and signed long-term agreements running into 2028. Seagate has allocated the vast majority of its nearline exabytes into calendar 2028 and reports customers asking to plan for 2029. Charles Giancarlo, chairman and chief executive of Everpure, told customers in April that prices had risen roughly 70 percent since January. That increase lands on top of a decade in which per-terabyte prices fell about 20 percent every year.

The supply side has chosen not to build its way out. Seagate closed its fiscal year at a 52.7 percent gross margin with incremental margins above 60 percent, and guided capital expenditure to 4 to 6 percent of revenue. Micron’s Singapore fab produces nothing until the second half of 2028. Every capacity plan, refresh cycle, and three-year budget model in the enterprise rested on the assumption that storage gets cheaper each year. That assumption broke in four months, and no major forecaster has prices returning to 2025 levels inside their horizon.

The most consistent response in the study is structural rather than transactional. Ninety-eight percent of organizations are consolidating infrastructure layers, meaning they are combining virtualization, storage, networking, or data protection into fewer platforms, or actively exploring how to do it. Two percent are not considering it at all. Omdia’s own language in the research indicates that consolidation has moved from optional optimization to existential necessity, and that organizations are no longer debating whether to consolidate but how quickly they can execute.

Omdia also asked which storage technologies organizations plan to invest in significantly as a direct response to the shortage. Buyers who do not run software-defined storage today ranked it first out of eight options, ahead of cloud storage, on-premises object storage, hybrid arrays, and all-flash arrays. Hyperconverged infrastructure placed sixth.

Seventy-four percent of respondents also report evaluating ways to integrate data protection and disaster recovery more closely with primary storage, with the stated goal of reducing total hardware footprint. At current component prices, a second copy of production sitting on a second set of arrays with its own refresh cycle is the most expensive redundancy in the building.

The circularity in this market deserves a board-level conversation. Hyperscalers bought the memory and flash supply to build AI infrastructure, which raised the price of the storage that enterprise AI initiatives now need. Seventy-four percent of the organizations Omdia surveyed say the shortage is slowing their ability to deploy AI infrastructure on premises. The companies that caused the constraint are the ones best positioned to sell their way around it.

Navigating the Great Enterprise Storage Squeeze is multi-client research conducted by Omdia and commissioned by VergeIO. Omdia surveyed 400 North American IT professionals, all screened for storage and infrastructure responsibility, between May 6 and May 26, 2026. Simon Robinson, Chief Analyst for Storage, led the research.

Omdia, part of Informa TechTarget, Inc., is a technology research and advisory group. Its deep knowledge of tech markets combined with actionable insights empower organizations to make smart growth decisions.

VergeIO is the developer of VergeOS, an integrated private cloud operating system that combines virtualization, storage, and networking into a single product and a single codebase. It runs on commodity hardware and gives organizations a direct alternative to VMware and legacy HCI, lowering cost and improving operational efficiency. VergeOS runs in production across enterprises and service providers worldwide. Learn more at verge.io.

George Crump, Chief Marketing Officer, VergeIO
[email protected]