CRN’s 2026 Storage 100 honors 100 vendors dedicated to bringing technology for everything from backing up data to making it available for use with AI whether it’s on-premises and/or in the cloud.
The data storage business continues to enjoy the kind of growth most markets can only dream of. For instance, according to research firm Fortune Business Insights, the global data storage market was valued at $255.29 billion in 2025 and is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 16.1 percent through 2034 when it potentially will hit $984.56 billion.
That growth is being driven by several very modern business drivers, including AI and business digital transformation, creating data that is increasingly valuable and requires technology not only to store it but to protect it, archive it, manage it and make it available as needed.
Despite the growth, or because of it, the storage industry in 2026 is also beset by a couple of unique challenges. There is a huge ongoing shortage of key components such as hard drives, SSDs and memory thanks to the massive data center growth caused by AI and the cloud. Furthermore, the rush to embrace AI and digital transformation is resulting in demand for better ways to not only store data but manage it and make available without impacting its security.
Yet for all the changes the IT industry is facing when it comes to dealing with data, it actually seems that everything old is new again, said Ned Engelke, CTO of Evotek, a San Diego-based solution provider.
“When we’re engaging with our customers, this is true this year just like it was last year, the year before, the year before, and the year before,” Engelke told CRN. “The questions are always the same ones that we’ve been answering forever. ‘I want a faster, cheaper storage plan. Hey, it’s too expensive. I’ve got it in the cloud. It’s too expensive. I’ve got it on-prem. It’s too expensive. How come it’s too expensive? How do we build an archive? How do we go find things once we’ve got it archived?’ All these challenges are the same.”
The cost increases related to scarcity and the need for high performance are causing customers and their channel partners to have to stop and dust off their old architectural skills, Engelke said.
“We tell customers, ‘Let’s look at what workloads really need that amount of performance,’” he said. “’Do you have the right media? Do you have the right approach? Can you move other workloads to a different tier?’ So now the architecture that we did back when I was a baby engineer is now exactly what we’re doing for our most sophisticated customers. The performance might be an order of magnitude higher, but the issues are the same.”
Engelke said what’s happening today is just the same as when a customer a long time ago said it needed its database to go faster.
“We’d have to figure out is the SQL done correctly?” he said. “Are the block sizes matched up? What’s happening when we communicate? Now we’re having to do that again when it comes to AI workloads. ‘Are you training something? Is it for a language model? Are you now in operation once you trained it?’”
The key here is that channel partners are now facing the same issues they’ve always faced despite scarcities and cost increases, with the scale the only real difference, Engelke said.
CRN’s 2026 Storage 100 honors 100 vendors dedicated to bringing technology for everything from backing up data to making it available for use with AI whether it’s on-premises and/or in the cloud.
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