A few less dollars to spend
Overall storage budgets will dip a bit from last year's level; at an average of $3.3 million, 2007's budget number represents a drop of approximately 8% from the $3.6 million reported last fall. Not coincidentally, that 8% decline almost matches the drop in planned new capacity (see graph 2, "Average storage budget for 2007 is $3.3 million," above).
Survey respondents report that even with a lower average budget, the new budget figure still represents an increase of 3.7% over the previous budget. It's a relatively modest increase, especially considering that the average increase last fall was 5.2%.
Other purchasing details also reflect the dip in budgets. For example, the types of disk purchases shifted dramatically, with 35% of respondents indicating that their primary disk spending this year would be for additional drives to use in existing storage systems--more than three times the number reported in last year's surveys. That increase corresponds with a similarly striking drop in primary disk spending earmarked for Fibre Channel (FC) arrays, a 30-point tumble to 29% from last fall's 59%.
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$2.1 billion
Average annual revenue for companies represented in survey
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