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Our survey was conducted in February and March 2004 by e-mail. Results are based on answers from 635 respondents, all of whom had specific purchasing authority for disk subsystems, network hardware, backup hardware or software or storage management software. Respondents represented a cross-section of industries, with financial services, manufacturing, government, education and the computer industry comprising the largest segments.
Storage managers say they are going to spend 4% more in 2004 than they spent last year, but a lot of the boost will go toward disk--adding capacity to the arrays they already own--rather than adding raw capacity. Tape spending is beginning to decline and disk backup is starting to take off. Networks continue to evolve, but switch purchases are getting less of the budget. And storage managers are hesitant to invest in storage management software.

That's according to the 635 respondents of Storage's March 2004 Purchasing Intentions Survey (see "About this survey"). The average spending boost will only be 4%, but 63% are increasing their spending in 2004, with half of them increasing by more than 10%.

Planned increases of disk capacity will go up from 13TB a year ago to 20TB, consuming 41% of storage budgets, up 9% from 18 months ago.

Despite all the talk about low staffing levels, budgeting for staff and services remains steady (see "Spending priorities have changed"). Media budgets continue at approximately 12% of overall spending.

Surprisingly, storage managers don't anticipate balancing disk spending with storage management software spending. Only 39% planned to increase spending on storage management software, despite increasing their spending on other storage hardware and software. While only 3% were cutting, a whopping 43% were holding level.

This was first published in May 2004

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