66% of European Respondents See Their 2009 Storage Budgets as Flat to Declining

Tarmin Technologies, provider of active archive, content addressable storage (CAS), information lifecycle management (ILM) and intelligent storage software optimised for secondary storage environments, announced the results of a survey of key Information Technology (IT) decision makers. Conducted in Q4 of 2008, the poll of storage and IT managers included 100 respondents from the UK, Italy, Germany, Ireland and other European countries, with 78 percent of the respondents from large or medium-sized enterprises.
 
Not surprisingly, 66 percent of the respondents indicated that they see their 2009 budgets as flat to declining.  At the same time, however, storage capacity needs will continue to increase, with 73 percent seeing these grow at a minimum of 30 percent per year and 17 percent of this group expecting capacity requirements to rise by at least 50 percent per year. These figures alone show that in 2009 there will be an unquestionable need to maximise existing storage resources and strategies to minimise purchase of expensive capacity. Although the IT infrastructure includes a range of applications, platforms, technologies and separate environments, the impact of the forecast storage growth on IT budgets is certainly going to be significant, with 48 percent of respondents saying that storage makes up over 20 percent of their total IT budget.
 
The survey results also showed:

• 59 percent see unstructured data as the number one cause of capacity growth
• 55 percent reported primary storage as their largest area of capacity expansion
• 54 percent would like to have immediate cost savings in storage capital and operation expenditures
• 68 percent are developing an official Green IT strategy
• 94 percent consider Green IT to either be directly linked to cost savings or both cost savings and an environmentally friendly strategy

“Despite today’s economic turbulence, storage capacity continues to grow exponentially,” said Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing and sales at Tarmin. “This study shows that solutions that reduce storage capital and operational expenditure, such as GridBank, meet the needs of both the budget holders and IT managers. Products that combine a number of technologies such as active archival, ILM, and policy-based storage automation, make any company’s storage operations much more cost effective, efficient, and environmentally responsible and will see substantially increased demand throughout 2009 and into 2010.”
 
Tarmin’s GridBank utilises industry-standard, heterogeneous server and storage platforms to form a grid-based active archive and intelligent, scalable storage solution that enables effective long-term, fixed-content data preservation on cost-effective secondary storage tiers. GridBank delivers a comprehensive storage software solution for that substantially reduces storage and IT costs while providing content addressable storage (CAS), information lifecycle management (ILM), policy-based storage automation, search and e-discovery, security, and audit management in an all-in-one package. A high-performance and high-availability product, GridBank satisfies any organisation’s regulatory compliance requirement by ensuring secure, long-term data retention, and fast search and retrieval of valuable business records, while providing a Greener IT storage environment.