Big data and the cloud have already gained “celebrity” status within the tech community. However, their main component lies not on the stiff competition in the industry, but storage.  Teaming up to secure leadership are EMC and VMware—two segments that were crafted to co-inhabit and support each other. They stepped it up a notch with the announcement of wide array of products lined up for release this year. The recent Wikibon study also depicted a good relationship between VMware and EMC. But, another vendor is also at the top of the rim, NetApp.

In his Wikibon blog and analysis, David Floyer provided a suggested action item on VMware administrators: “Users should focus on the ability of vendors and their partners to provide storage that is well integrated with VMware. They should ensure that good implementation services and documentation is available. Most of all, the storage should be easy to manage, and provide all the performance and usage metrics in a way that directly relates to the VM machines and storage. There is still time for disruptive innovation in this storage sector.”

EMC and NetApp clearly dominated the survey, garnering around 65% of the total VMware marketshare. When respondents are asked for the “best” vendors, EMC and NetApp gained a significant increase, pushing their combined numbers to 82%. Continuing their streak of victory within the VMware help, providers received 85% (EMC) and 77% (NetApp) for brand loyalty.

EMC’s recent updates made them one of the formidable cloud computing and data recovery hardware solutions providers in the marketplace today. The public is now is now anticipating its fourth quarter and 2011 fiscal year financial results. The enterprise is now heading in the direction of leveraging its extensive knowledge in storage technologies and will be enhancing management of virtualized Microsoft applications. EMC will do this via simplified storage provisioning and automatic discovery of physical servers, elimination of manual scripting requirement and introduce the new Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) for Microsoft. NetApp, on the other hand, has its share of success by way of partnership with Quantum and reselling its StorNext.

VMware still has tons of tactics that they will unleash, or perhaps discover in time. But they have to hurry up a bit before new players like Gluster and Tintri overtake them with innovations focusing on ease of use, which, by the way, is VMware’s most significant area in need of improvement. While storage sales soar, many vendors are still under pressure and the burden becomes heavier for the leaders of IT management.