Storage managers are continuing down the paths they indicated last March, if a little more cautiously, and those paths are leading toward a tiered environment (see "Green light for disk spending," in the May issue). People are buying disk across all the tiers, moving backup toward a hybrid of disk and tape, and adding IP into their storage networks.
Those are some of the conclusions emerging from the 606 responses to Storage magazine's August 2004 Purchasing Intentions Survey (see "About this survey"). Starting with the big picture, average budget increases over 2003 are at 2.7%, down from a projected 4.1% in March. Expectations for 2005 are for a similar budget hike of 2.6%. The decline from March is due largely to fewer people increasing spending by more than 10% over last year (22% vs. 33%), suggesting that some aggressive budget requests early in the year were chopped.
Disk hardware is still the biggest budget item, accounting for nearly half of budget allocations (see Question 1). Storage management software spending remains level at about 15% of budget, as does staff spending. In fact, the only significant change since 2002 in budget allocation is the reduction of network hardware spending from a high of 18% in 2002 to 12% in this survey, with most of the savings going toward increased disk spending (33% in 2002 vs. 42% in this survey).
