What an IT pro can do during the storage supply apocalypse

Remember the ol’ toilet paper shortage of 2020? Some IT pros are reliving that conundrum—except this time, instead of two-ply rolls, they are struggling to find storage devices.

As AI companies and data-center builders continue to gobble up available storage and high-bandwidth memory for training the latest AI models, IT pros shopping around for hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and RAM are seeing higher prices and a crunch in availability.

The big short. Executives from WD (formerly Western Digital), and Seagate, the two players with the most market share in the HDD industry, recently disclosed on their respective quarterly earnings calls that they have sold out HDD units for the 2026 calendar year.

“We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers and we’ve also established long-term agreements with two of them for calendar year ’27 and one of them for calendar year ’28,” WD CEO Tiang Yew Tan said during a Jan. 29 call with stakeholders.

The SSD and computer memory industry is facing similar challenges. IT Brew previously reported how supply and demand imbalances are fueling price hikes among dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and SSD vendors.

Ashish Nadkarni, group VP and general manager of IDC’s enterprise infrastructure group, told IT Brew the problems across the memory and storage industry are intertwined.

“This memory problem that we’ve been hearing about…also affects storage vendors because their hard drive-only storage or hybrid flash storage cannot ship without memory in it,” Nadkarni said. The increased market demand for storage has caused some vendors to prioritize their largest customers, leaving smaller organizations and their IT pros to fend for themselves, he added.

“When they have such high demand from the hyperscalers, they’re going to cater to those guys, first because of the volume, and then everybody else has to fall in line,” Nadkarni said.

What’s an IT pro to do? Ugur Tigli, CTO at object storage system company MinIO, said he is hearing from customers that storage supply constraints are top of mind, especially for those who are trying to quickly get AI projects past the finish line.

“It’s a total race between all players, and they are trying to get time to market in terms of proving, internally and externally, that they have some AI tools,” Tigli said. “And in order to make the AI infrastructure work, it’s [storage] availability.”

He suggested enterprises should “recycle” and make use of existing hardware storage options, while relying on software-defined storage companies for additional support.

“You have to make the best out of what existing clusters you have,” Tigli said, adding that enterprises can look to software-defined storage companies, which uncouple storage from physical hardware and can often be a cheaper alternative, as hardware vendors iron out their shortage issue.

Nadkarni advised professionals to be wary of their storage utilization needs and to plan ahead.

“[IT pros] don’t have direct or indirect visibility into the supply chain, and the only view they have is through their vendors,” Nadkarni said. “So, most enterprises can get better visibility into what their storage consumption looks like, and be able to predict far in advance of their need for new storage.”