Storage magazine's 2006 Purchasing Intentions Survey indicated that overall storage spending is up with the average budget increasing by 5.2%. The following chart shows overall 2006 spending by storage managers.
(For additional chart details, visit SearchStorage.com.)
However, what these numbers belie is the amount and types of additional storage capacity users are purchasing when compared to previous years.
For instance, 2006 saw the widespread adoption of 250 GB to 750 GB SATA drives by storage vendors in their products. Nexsan Technologies' VP of Marketing, Brendan Kinkade, attributed SATA hard drive's increased adoption rate to significant improvements in quality by drive manufacturers. "Enterprise SATA hard drives now include five-year warranties, are rated at over one million hours MTBF and share many of the design features and components of their more expensive FC brethren," Kinkade said.
This has resulted in nearly every size organization -- small, medium and large -- using products for specific corporate applications. Email archives (EMC Centera), near-line email repositories (NetApp NearStore FAS3000), virtual tape libraries (Sepaton S2100-ES2) and video streaming applications (Isilon Systems IQ) are just some of the ways that users can now deploy storage array products that utilize SATA hard drives.
Storage Buying Guide
Part 1: What are your customers buying?
Part 2: Increased SATA hard drive adoption
Part 3: Hard drive replacement
Part 4: Production iSCSI SAN interest rises
Part 5: Less data storage management spending
Part 6: Respond to customers' storage buying habits
About the author: Jerome Wendt is an independent writer and analyst specializing in the field of open systems storage and storage area networks. He has managed storage for small and large organizations in this capacity.
