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Economy and capacity at odds
This article is part of the Storage magazine issue of Vol. 7 No. 8 October 2008
Storage managers are starting to feel the pinch of a slowing economy, but they still have to store and protect more data than ever. The weak economy hit storage managers with a double whammy: less money to store more data. According to the latest edition of Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions Survey, the average storage budget reported by respondents was $2.6 million--not a meager amount, but 19% off the average figure reported last spring and 24% less than last fall's tally (see "How storage budgets break down," below). And if you turn the calendar back a couple of years and compare it to the fall of 2006, the drop is even more precipitous at 28%. It looks like some belt tightening is the order of the day, at least for the foreseeable future. But even with fewer bucks in the bank, dollars are earmarked in much the same way as in the past six years, with the biggest chunk (42%) going toward disk hardware (see "Where storage budget dollars go," below). While disk and disk system prices have decreased significantly over the ...
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Features in this issue
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Solid-state distinctions emerge
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Economy and capacity at odds
With fewer bucks in the budget, storage managers are facing some constraints in dealing with growing storage capacities. But, according to Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions survey, they're responding by earmarking some of those dollars to newer technologies like data deduplication that will help them cope with burgeoning data stores.
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Thin (or chubby) provisioning catching on
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Question of the Month
How often do you think your DR plan should be tested?
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Storage for high-performance computing
The storage and server cluster installed at The University of Texas at Austin is a lesson in how to do high-performance computing (HPC). Storage requirements for HPC go beyond massive capacity and include the use of high-performance file systems.
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Ask the Experts
Where and when should we use data dedupe for remote-office backups?
Columns in this issue
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Hot Spots: Don't let SaaS costs sneak up on you
There are plenty of good reasons to opt for backup storage as a service, but there are also plenty of questions you should ask before green lighting any move to online backup.
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Storage Bin 2.0 The color of money
If your actions will help meet the company's overall green objectives of making more money faster, you'll probably find your status growing along with your budget.
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Best Practices: Why you can't go it alone
Most IT departments are split into islands of expertise, like storage, servers and networks. But the time is coming when those disparate groups will have to learn to work together. Network consolidation is just one of the technologies forcing storage pros to build stronger interdisciplinary IT teams.