There may be a slight respite for storage managers who have spent the last few years trying to keep up with runaway storage growth, according to the results of Storage magazine's spring 2007 Purchasing Intentions Survey (see "About the survey"). But make no mistake--while it looks like the breakneck pace may be slowing down a bit, increasing capacity is still high on nearly every storage shop's to-do list.

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For the first time in the five years we've been conducting our survey (which gauges what storage technology purchases storage managers are likely to make in the coming year), the average amount of storage our 680 respondents say they'll buy dropped from the previous year's level. The expected additional capacity is still considerable--an average of 37TB--but approximately 8% lower than last fall's average and roughly equal to the spring 2006 estimate (see graph 1, "Storage growth may moderate in 2007," above).

But not all storage shops plan to cut back on new disk purchases. Ken Boyer, SAN infrastructure specialist at Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia, expects to increase installed capacity this year. "We just went through a major storage migration project that just completed this year," says Boyer. "Our next goal is to start doing some tiering." Boyer expects the tiering project to account for most of the company's purchases of 50TB or more of additional storage.

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