IT Focuses On Storage Challenges

Storage Growth No Longer Off the Charts

Storage buyers are classified into three major camps as measured by their propensity to spend: slow-to-no growth (less than a 10 percent increase); moderate (10 percent to 25 percent increase); and high-growth (25 percent or more) buyers. Of the survey respondents, 25 percent were slow-to-no growth, 37 percent were moderate buyers, and 38 percent were high growth.

Overall storage spending will slow in 2003, with continued fast growth occurring only in specific vertical-market segments. For example, one Midwest medical institution says it will double storage over the next year in order to comply with HIPAA requirements.

If average storage growth were to be calculated, the high-growth enterprises would push the overall rate upward to one that still could be considered high. Growth rate seems to be independent of how much disk storage is currently installed.

When IT managers were asked how they expected their budgets for storage and storage-management products and services to change in 2003 from 2002, 72 percent of the respondents reported small increases, no increases or decreases.

Even though no respondents expected the amount of managed storage to decline, 25 percent expected budget dollars to decline. These budget constraints, combined with the expressed plans for increasing storage capacity, indicate that IT buyers are expecting the cost of storage to fall faster than the increase in disk storage.

This finding can also mean that overall storage growth will not necessarily translate into growth in overall storage revenue.

IT managers were next asked about the problems they currently face or anticipate and to rate each problem on a scale of one to seven, where one represents a low and seven represents a high score.

The biggest single problem relates to implementing/updating disaster-recovery processes and resources,80 percent of the responses were at the high or medium level. Only 5 percent of respondents indicated that it was "not an issue," and 15 percent said it was a minor problem.

Service Problems

Delivering required service levels is a high-or medium-level problem to 60 percent of the respondents. Minimizing lack of data availability is a high- or medium-level problem to 58 percent, while minimizing storage I/O bottlenecks is a high- or medium-level problem for 57.5 percent.

IT managers were asked to identify the actions they are evaluating or planning. Not surprising, 77.5 percent of the respondents will take minor action or no action with respect to hiring more people. Outsourcing at least part of storage or storage management to a third party is not an action for 65 percent of IT managers, but is a high- or medium-level action for 25 percent of IT managers.

Storage Hardware

IT managers, to the tune of 75 percent, said that buying new disk storage was a high- or medium-level action. When asked if they planned to expand current SANs, 52.5 percent of the respondents said it was a high- or medium-level action item; the other 47.5 percent either did not plan to expand or did not have a SAN to expand. In total, roughly 40 percent plan to implement a new SAN, whereas about 60 percent are not. Similarly for NAS, 40 percent said they considered it a high- or medium-level action item.

In conclusion, respondents who do not expect storage to grow rapidly tend to have very few storage-related problems and, therefore, do not plan to take actions. In contrast, all others,both from moderate-growth and high-growth enterprises,tend to have a far-ranging set of storage problems and, thus, plan to take a wide range of actions.

Therefore, even in a time of tight budgets, enterprises need to work hard to match up their storage-related problems with the actions they plan to take.

Analyst David Hill ([email protected]) focuses on storage and Wyeth Lynch on ASPs ([email protected]) at Aberdeen Group in Boston.