Storage growth drives buying plans

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Adding capacity is job No. 1 for many storage managers, and this new storage is creating a ripple effect for other purchasing initiatives.

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Storage managers continue to add capacity to their existing storage environments at an unprecedented pace. The additional storage, in turn, has caused a ripple effect across the entire storage infrastructure, influencing buying priorities for the remainder of this year.

According to the latest edition of Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions Survey, companies will add an average of 37TB of new capacity this year--up from 30TB last fall and 23TB one year ago--taking a 22% bite out of total budget allocations. Charlie Orndorff, vice president of infrastructure services at Plano, TX-based Crossmark Information Services, a consumer goods services company, is feeling the capacity crunch. "We added about 15TB this year to get us through the year," says Orndorff. That brings his shop's total installed capacity on primarily Hewlett-Packard (HP) arrays up to approximately 40TB. But Orndorff isn't complacent about his capacity needs. "We're growing at around 350GB to 400GB a week," he says.

For other companies, budgets may not be bumped up this year to add disk, but capacity issues haven't gone away. "Last year we did major acquisitions, major enhancements of our storage for both the SAN and NAS systems," says Anthony Maceroli, managing director of information technology at New York City-based Fitch Ratings. "This is the year to get all that in place--getting all the replication working and managing growth."

Overall, storage budgets for 2006 will average approximately $3.4 million, 5.2% higher than last year. The 5.2% figure was consistent across all sizes of companies (see "2006 storage budgets" and "Storage budgets rise 5.2% on average"). Fifty-six percent of our surveyed companies say they're increasing storage budgets to some degree, a 16% rise vs. the same time last year.

This was first published in June 2006

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