Navigating the 2026 Hardware Crunch: Resilient Storage Strategies for Enterprises
In this article, I will outline how to address the current hardware supply-and-demand imbalance, ensuring that enterprises' precious capital expenditure budgets withstand the wave of hardware price increases and support their continued growth at a reasonable cost.
In Q4 of 2025, several of our overseas clients told us they were planning to deploy new Ceph storage clusters using refurbished servers, or that they had originally planned to purchase brand-new servers but later changed their plans. While there have been prior cases of using refurbished servers, they have become more frequent recently. The main reason is that, since 2025, prices and procurement lead times for servers and key peripheral components such as DRAM, SSDs, and hard drives have risen sharply. Most enterprises are facing the same dilemma. Furthermore, this shortage of IT servers and storage devices will persist over the next two years.
I want to share strategies how enterprises can address this dilemma and strengthen their resilience to the wave of IT equipment supply shortages.
Traditional storage devices are often sold bundled with software. In situations of hardware supply-and-demand imbalance, can enterprises simply adapt to this model?
The most effective way to regain your control over storage system strategy is to decouple storage system software and hardware. This means separating the software and hardware vendors. To achieve this, the most important step is to adopt software-defined storage, which typically uses commodity servers, standard HDDs, SSDs, and network cards. You eliminate vendor-lock-in and often costly hardwares. This flexibility is crucial when hardware supply is tight.
There are several mature software-defined storage software whose functionality is not limited by commercial licenses. Among them, Ceph is the only one with the most complete functionality, capable of achieving High Availability against hardware failure and self-healing capability.
Enterprises may face initial hurdles when adopting Ceph storage. These include
- unfamiliarity with the software's architecture and operating principles
- how to design their own required architecture, and
- unfamiliarity with the operation of new software
However, these issues can be easily addressed. Ceph has professional services providers worldwide, including IBM, Red Hat, Canonical, and Ambedded. Ceph are not bound to any single software service provider. If you are dissatisfied with your existing service provider, you can switch to another provider or transition to self-service. You can use Ceph at no license cost. By simply subscribing to these service providers, you can get architecture design consulting, pre-built and validated software packages, deploying services, software upgrades, and technical support.
Once the software is selected, hardware options are even more flexible. Since Ceph runs on general-purpose servers, they can be any brand or white-label. As long as your performance and storage requirements meet Ceph's hardware requirements, you can choose the hardware vendor you trust.
Another strategy you can consider is using cost-effective refurbished servers. These are typically retired or off-lease from data centers. With professional inspection, cleaning, and parts replacement, their performance is close to that of new servers. These unit can combine with high speed 25Gb, or 100Gb network cards to meet your performance requirements. Our experience shows that refurbished servers can go for more than five years with very few failures. Moreover, Ceph incorporates server fail-safe protection as a core feature.
When you are considering high-performance ALL-Flash storage, the three- to four fold price increase for NVMe SSDs may be prohibitive for your budget. At this point, you can reconsider whether your application truly requires All-Flash. Besides pure HDDs and All-Flash, Ceph's S3 object storage supports object lifecycle management. According to your object life cycle policy, Ceph migrates objects from the NVMe pool to the hard drive pool, freeing up valuable NVMe storage space for new or frequently used data. For most applications, this hybrid strategy offers the same user experience at a lower overall cost.
The hardware shortage is expected to last at least the next two years. By embracing open-source flexibility and smarter hardware sourcing, your enterprise can survive the supply chain crunch and achieve sustainable growth without overspending.