Almost 20% of Storage readers say expanding their SANs will be their highest priority in 2007. Data protection projects aren't too far behind: Sixteen percent are focusing on wide-area replication efforts and 15% are planning archiving projects. While it isn't too surprising that expansion and disaster recovery are at the forefront for storage managers, it's interesting that some of the most talked about storage strategies today--virtualization, tiered storage and disk-to-disk backup--fell further down the list, each receiving 7% of responses.
Deploying virtualization or other major initiatives that require rearchitecting the storage environment may be displaced by smaller efforts that yield more immediate results. Forty percent of readers expect to have their top priority project completed within the next seven to 12 months, while another 38% expect to finish in the first half of the year. And because 47% say they're still in the planning stages, it's a safe bet storage managers are looking at projects that will give them the quickest bang for their buck. Further, with the majority of respondents indicating that they'll do all of the work in-house (81%) and close to half spending less than $200,000 (45%), it looks like most companies are saving long-term, larger scale projects for later.
--Trina MacDonald
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This was first published in January 2007