"We just added 50[TB] in the USP," says Kim Visher, senior storage administrator at The Timken Co., Canton, OH. But in addition to beefing up the capacity of an existing system, Visher says the company is "looking for another 20[TB] at our DR site in the form of an AMS Tier-2-type box from Hitachi." Most of the new capacity is related to an SAP migration project but, "a lot of it is still plain old growth," says Visher.
While some good old-fashioned belt tightening might explain those lower numbers, there's more behind the shifts in spending priorities. Companies have been fighting an uphill battle to cope with capacity. This year, it looks like storage managers are filling out the capacities of arrays bought within the last couple of years.
Boyer at Independence Blue Cross says the company's storage budget will be lower than last year's. "That was done purposely by the way we did our purchases the previous year," he says. For this year, Boyer expects the company to cut its disk spending by approximately half, mainly for Tier-2. "We're probably not going to have to buy any Tier-1 at all this year," he says.
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3.7%
Average increase in storage budgets
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