Capacity is still an issue
Over the years, our surveys have reflected the tremendous growth in installed storage capacity, precipitated largely by compliance and legal readiness efforts. Consequently, as recently as last fall, survey respondents reported they were adding an average of 40TB of capacity--approximately twice as much as two years ago. In this year's spring survey, the average amount of additional storage dipped to 37TB. At that time, we speculated that many storage managers anticipated future needs and purchased arrays that had room to grow. In the most recent survey, that number nudged upward to 38TB (see "Average storage capacity to be added this year," below). While the change isn't statistically significant, adding 38TB to the average storage environment is--and storage managers will continue to juggle resources to cope with rising capacities.

All of that new capacity isn't necessarily coming in the form of brand-new arrays. Last spring, our survey group said that 35% of their disk-related expenses would go to new or replacement disks for existing arrays. That was nearly triple the number recorded on previous surveys, and was counterbalanced by a big drop in planned new Fibre Channel (FC) SAN spending. That trend appears to be continuing, as the percentages from the fall survey jibe almost exactly with the spring results.

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