5 storage industry predictions for 2026

Making data and storage AI-ready

No surprise that we're kicking off our predictions with AI. Despite concerns around the degree to which we may be in an AI bubble, the global AI infrastructure build-out continues at a relentless and unprecedented pace (which is itself creating storage industry challenges, as we discuss next).

We noted a year ago that data-related infrastructure challenges – everything from storage performance bottlenecks to a plethora of data readiness issues - are a key barrier in driving AI success. If anything, these issues have become even more pronounced over the last 12 months, especially as the promise of AI continues to expand into areas such as advanced reasoning and agentic, and as more organizations shift their attention to the 'value realization' phase of AI; inference.

The major difference versus a year ago is that there are now many more options for customers looking to use data infrastructure -- within their own environment, in hyperscale or GPU-centric' neoclouds' -- that meet these challenges.

Over the last 12 months, we've seen significant new product announcements from storage industry heavyweights, including IBM, Dell, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp and Pure Storage, as well as from early AI storage pacesetters such as VAST Data, DDN, Weka and Hammerspace. Such efforts are joined up with technology and infrastructure initiatives from the AI ecosystem -- chiefly NVIDIA, but also with partners in the data management realm.

With a growing number of AI-optimized storage options now available in the field, the coming year will be a critical period for initial deployment, providing both vendors and customers with essential experience and a better understanding of how storage infrastructure should evolve to meet objectives for AI at scale within the enterprise. It's important to remember that AI is still in its infancy and still evolving, but the imperative to translate promise and intent into action is increasingly evident, and continues to pull the storage infrastructure into the heart of the discussion.

Storage component shortages may alter the shape of AI deployments

Major storage component supply constraints certainly weren't top of mind a year ago. In fact, this issue has emerged quickly in the latter part of 2025, and looks set to have a major bearing on overall enterprise storage costs -- and potentially purchases - over the next couple of years at least.

The primary cause is a confluence of two factors. First, the major storage and memory fabricators had already pivoted away from NAND Flash production, in favor of producing the ultra-fast (and more lucrative) high-bandwidth memory that feeds data to GPUs in large-scale AI environments. This limitation in overall capacity has been compounded by a sudden and significant rise in NAND demand in mid-2025. Hyperscale and GPU cloud providers realized they would need substantially more storage capacity than initially projected to meet increasingly demanding AI inference workloads. For instance, lengthening' context windows' in generative and agentic AI workflows requires substantially more data to be held in fast storage, adjacent to GPUs. Most SSD providers have reported they have already sold their entire capacity for the next year; despite this, there's little appetite to substantially increase NAND manufacturing capacity.

Though such constraints are nothing new in an industry that is notoriously difficult to predict, the timing of this shortage does have knock-on effects that will reverberate across the industry over 2026 and beyond. Storage component prices are already rising across the board -- not just memory and SSDs, but HDDs as well -- and, although major storage system suppliers are confident of securing supply, this could translate into price increases that may see customers look to sweat their existing assets for longer, delay purchases or even switch strategy.

Customers will also pay more attention to systems that can demonstrate high storage utilization and efficiency, as well as deployment models -- both on- and off-premises -- that offer better unit economics. This will enable customers to extract more value from their deployed capacity. The great storage squeeze may be on, but organizations needn't have to compromise on their AI or broader digital ambitions as a result if they manage their requirements smartly.

Cyber-resilience in primary storage moves from 'nice to have' to critical

With cybercrime in all its myriad forms becoming increasingly sophisticated and making headlines almost daily, organizations are aware of both the scale of the threat and the painful reality that, sooner or later, they are going to be compromised. In such a scenario, the need to be resilient in the face of a successful attack has now become an operational necessity.

Through 2025, we saw cyber-resiliency in the storage and data infrastructure continue its evolution; advanced resiliency capabilities are becoming increasingly standard in the data backup and protection environment -- to the extent that CommVault even coined the term' Resiliency Operations' (ResOps) to describe the operational imperative around cyber resiliency in the modern era.

However, it also follows that the sooner an organization has notice of a potential breach, the sooner it can take action to both limit/contain the threat, as well as take action to ensure rapid recovery and a return to normal operations. Hence, we are now seeing more emphasis on integrating resiliency capabilities into the primary storage environment, as well as the backup infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, different vendors are taking different paths here, as detailed in our recent blog. Nonetheless, as IT leaders look to all parts of the environment to play their part in helping protect the organization from the cyber onslaught, the role of storage as a 'last line of defence' is not only increasingly critical, but also increasingly capable.

Digital sovereignty will drive more decision making, with data residency and storage implications

Although digital sovereignty is a simple enough concept -- that individuals, organizations and nations should have the ability to control their own digital assets and destiny -- it's a broad and complex topic that spans a range of issues and corporate functions. This means implementation will be different for virtually every organisation, and hence has no single or simple means of implementation.

Nonetheless, the topic is attracting significant attention in boardrooms across the globe because of multiple factors: geopolitics, the rise of AI, increased regulations around privacy and resiliency and technology lock-in concerns, among them. It's already having a major bearing on discussions around not only which technology providers customers choose, but where those capabilities should reside.

The physical location of where data resides underpins who has legal authority over it, making storage infrastructure a critical consideration within the broader sovereignty debate. Ultimately, organizations want granular controls that they can consistently apply across all their data and storage silos.

These issues have already sparked a series of moves in 2025. The major US hyperscalers are investing significantly in 'sovereign cloud' capabilities, creating cloud capabilities that limit data storage and processing to specific regions (such as Europe), and are even overseen by a board comprising EU-only nationals. Regional cloud providers in Europe and other regions also see a substantial opportunity to onboard new clients and are investing accordingly.

But the sovereignty debate also has the potential to make on-premises IT deployments more appealing, which will spark higher investments in sovereign capabilities from traditional on-premises infrastructure vendors. Indeed, many of these are already in motion, with notable recent announcements from VMware and Nutanix, among others.

In addition, the major cloud providers are ramping up their investments in on-premises cloud capabilities. Hybrid cloud infrastructure offerings such as AWS Outposts, Azure Local and Google Distributed Cloud have been around for some time, but data sovereignty considerations, aligned with the promise of AI, looks set to make them much more relevant.

In summary, organizations looking for data sovereignty tools in 2026 will be spoiled for choice, though this is still a rapidly evolving space, and they need to be confident that any tool can meet their strategic needs over the longer term.

Continued evolutions of the storage admin role

Our final prediction concerns the evolution of infrastructure staffing roles, and storage admins in particular, as IT infrastructure continues to evolve. Once again, multiple factors are combining to challenge traditional ways of deploying and managing infrastructure, including:

• The ongoing impacts of shifts in the virtualization landscape.
• The continuing rise of containers and cloud-native architectures (especially those underpinning AI workloads).
• The growing need to establish a common control plane that enables consistent management of all the above across an increasingly hybrid cloud environment.

The past year has seen some notable developments across all of these aspects, which we expect to continue evolving over the coming year. Nutanix, for example, continued its evolution beyond its hyperconverged infrastructure roots with deeper public cloud integration, as well as support for third party storage arrays from Dell and Pure Storage. Dell, meanwhile, continues to pivot back to its own storage IP with a range of private cloud offerings managed under the Dell Automation Platform, while Pure unveiled its vision to manage an organization's broader data environment using the Enterprise Data Cloud, and NetApp continues to evolve its Intelligent Data Infrastructure vision.

Initiatives such as these are designed to help customers more effectively manage increasingly diverse and fragmented environments, enabling consistent management and automation (increasingly using AI, where appropriate) to reduce operational complexity.

These developments also serve to underscore the continued evolution of storage admin roles within the enterprise. Though effective storage infrastructure management remains critical, the specifics of how this is achieved are changing. Admins already need to be versatile across not just the storage stack but across the broader infrastructure environment.

The pressure is now on IT and storage admins to expand their remit even further: across the hybrid cloud; supporting multiple hypervisor environments and cloud-native architectures; supporting the cyber resiliency strategy; and, potentially, reaching further into the data management layer as enterprise AI takes hold. This will require significantly more automation across the entire environment; developments this year suggest we're already on that path, but there's still some ways to go.

Simon Robinson is a principal analyst covering infrastructure at Omdia.

Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.