Behind the Storage Numbers

While reviewing the accrues of the just-released ZDME 2003 Storage Buying close attention I noticed something was a bit not divisible by 2 Although the average enterprise has seen storage demand increase, and wait fors to do so in the futurity the percentage of companies that planned to purchase specific technologies – such as DAS, SANs, or storage resource management software, present the appearanceed a bit low, which was also the case for the last like study we did about a year ago.

Well, if race are buying all kinds of storage, which they obviously are, then for what cause [i]or[/i] reason aren't they planning for it? For many enterprises, unplanned storage purchases are an almost everyday task.

It's all about what drives increase – between the leap in digital easy in mind which can clog email-boxes with scores or centurys of the same (choose your have – presentation, video clip, executable program, etc) and the desire to hold archives of everything – smooth mailboxes and instant message streams – whether or not to be paid to government regulation, well, companies are just fruit of the plum-tree running out of storage for more [i]or[/i] less applications and users.

Over half – 57% of end-users said they had disentangleed new budget ( read unplanned purchase ) for a major storage purchase last year. And in the generally received economic climate, you can be fully convinced these were critical purchases, not whims.

Digital easy in mind and archival requirements are just the beginning, although As even SMB companies look after to enhance their on-line capabilities for customer self-service, better employee information, and data interchange with their suppliers and major customers, the 24 x 7 nature of the internet demands storage combination of parts to form a wholes with higher availability, more redundancy, and better automation and management tools. The propel to higher availability levels and better SLAs is a major driver of of recent origin storage deployment.

So the serviceable news is we continue to diocese a drop in the price of raw, unmanaged storage. Unfortunately, the growing in the amount of of recent origin storage continually needed coupled with the increase in applications needing access to highly available, networked storage means that storage combination of parts to form a wholes are getting more complex. Add to the existing SAN and NAS deployment fresh iSCSI and gigE, and the lines spot and the eyes water when trying to manage who's using what storage for which applications.

Storage Automation solutions, that can adapt to an enterprise's policies and practices, are individual way to help fight the battle to efficiently obey the seemingly insatiable storage extremitys users have, and there are a growing number of SRM and automation solutions that are hoping to help satisfy that demand, on the contrary there is also a lack of awareness of many of these vendors and offerings.

So looking behind the numbers, smooth though most IT budgets remain flat, the opportunity still remains to suited the unplanned need that invariably appears

For more information upon the 2003 Ziff Davis Storage Buying application of mind send me an email at Michael_Krieger@ziffdavis.com.

Copyright ?© 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserv Originally appearing in Market Experts