ComputerWorld.in

Storage spending focused on data consolidation, fast ROI

A study released today by research firm TheInfoPro showed that those in charge of IT dollars at corporations around the U.S. and Europe are focused on buying technology that can optimize systems they are already using.

For example, the study concluded that companies are spending significant dollars on thin provisioning, which allocates storage capacity on an as-needed basis for apps, and data de-duplication technology, which eliminates duplicate files or blocks of data either at the primary storage layer or during backups.

On the other hand, TheInfoPro's survey found that few companies are deploying new business applications, which would, in-turn, drive new data storage technology purchases.

"Major spending increases won't resume until new business application installs once again create massive demands on storage needs," said Rob Stevenson, managing director of storage research at TheInfoPro. "In the interim, storage shops will focus on productivity improvement and hardware inventory adjustments to prepare for virtualization and cloud support needs."

TheInfoPro's study, which is based on interviews with storage decision makers in North America and Europe, revealed that while 45% of Fortune 1000 respondents plan to increase storage spending in the coming months, 29% still expect major budget cuts. In contrast, 41% of midsized enterprises plan to increase storage spending this year, while 25% expect further budget reductions.

Among the top technologies in TheInfoPro's so-called "Heat Indexes", which identify trends in early technology adoption for both Fortune 1000 and mid-sized enterprises, were: E-mail archiving, information lifecycle management and storage resource management systems, said Ken Male, TheInfoPro's executive vice chairman.

The average Fortune 1000 company has about 1.2 petabytes of disk-based data storage capacity today, so anything that will help manage the data tsunami or trim excess data is hot, Male added.