Storage Budget Growth Slows in First Half of 2012

TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, released its latest storage study, indicating slower budget growth than previous years.

Covering the first half of 2012, TheInfoPro Storage Study, identifies key initiatives to maximize resources including market factors and major players. This periodic study is based on interviews with storage professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe.

"After excellent growth in the last two years, storage budgets will grow more slowly in 2012 despite expanding capacity," said Marco Coulter, TheInfoPro’s research director of Storage. "While focused on optimizing storage capacity and supporting server virtualization, some storage architects are concurrently preparing to deliver cloud-like provisioning.”

Coulter said key trends include:

Storage budget growth slows compared to 2011 as 6% fewer respondents identify as having increasing budgets in 2012. Mid-size enterprises see the most belt-tightening with only 36% planning to increase spending, down from 47%.
Networked capacity in large enterprises will grow a projected 26% this year. Drive choices are changing and FC drives lost predominance in 2011 purchases.
Automated tiering displaces backup data reduction/deduplication as the hottest technology in storage on TheInfoPro’s proprietary Technology Heat Index. Implementation of other optimization technologies is anticipated to grow including data reduction/deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning.
Hybrid arrays, using solid-state alongside rotating disks in arrays, approaches majority use in enterprise datacenters, while new players abound for solid-state arrays and in server-installed. Solid state vendors selected as exciting include: Fusion-io, Pure Storage, Nimbus Data, Nimble Storage, Gridiron Sys, Kove.
Server virtualization is the leading driver of capacity growth remaining a predominantly FC SAN destination. 67% of respondents have 80-100% of production servers connected to FC SAN.
56% of respondents have no plans for big data even beyond 2013.
FC storage networks are predominant with 84% of respondents. As port counts increase Cisco is appearing in more data centers.

About TheInfoPro Storage Study
It takes a look at key trends across the industry, and tracks the performance of individual vendors. Now in its tenth year, Wave 16 it covers 1H2012 and was published in June 2012. TheInfoPro’s methodology uses interviews with professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe. Each interview explores areas including the implementation and spending plans for over thirty technologies, evaluations of vendors observed from business and product perspectives, IT influences transforming the sector, and supporting decision processes. Results are collated into research reports providing business intelligence in the form of technological road maps, budget trends, capacity and spending plans, along with vendor performance ratings. A sampling of vendors covered in the Vendor Performance and Technology Roadmap components of the study include: EMC, NetApp, Cisco, Brocade, HDS, IBM, HP, Symantec, Dell, CommVault, QLogic, Emulex, Quantum, Sepaton, FalconStor, Virtual Instruments, and F5.