HP rising?
Disk hardware--historically approximately 40% of the pie--takes the biggest bite out of the storage budget. This is fairly consistent regardless of company size, although disk hardware accounts for a slightly larger slice in smaller companies.

EMC Corp. has been the dominant provider of disk systems for midsized and larger companies. Smaller firms typically find it more comfortable to deal with an "end-to-end" vendor that can supply their servers, networking gear and storage. It makes purchasing easier and provides a "one throat to choke" approach to technical support.

In this survey, EMC is still king of the hill, cited by nearly 25% of all respondents as their prime disk system vendor. Among large companies, EMC has an even greater presence, with 37% saying the big "E" will be their primary disk vendor in 2008. As far as purchases made or planned for this year, EMC is once again the overall leader, with approximately 41% of respondents stating they bought EMC s...

HP has also lengthened its lead over the third most-popular source of disk systems, Dell Inc., by approximately six percentage points; last spring, IBM Corp. held the third slot, four points behind HP. HP shows strength across the board in this survey; regardless of company size, 35% to 36% of respondents purchased or plan to buy HP storage systems this year. To achieve this, HP's numbers for medium-sized companies went from 29% last spring to 36% this time; among smaller companies, a similar rise was shown from 29% to 36%.

The main factor in choosing a disk vendor is still the features and functions of the equipment in question, according to 28% of respondents, about the same as last spring. Twenty percent say they favor a vendor that provides other technology to their companies, while approximately the same number indicate tech support is a decisive factor.

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