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Storage Professionals Target Automating Homegrown Activities and Underutilized Assets to Boost Productivity - According to the TheInfoPro (TIP) Storage Studies
NEW YORK --(Business Wire)-- June 14, 2006 -- TheInfoPro (TIP, www.TheInfoPro.net) released its Time Series report as part of the Wave 7 Storage Networking and Management study. Intended to compare the data of this and three previous Waves of study, which occur in six-month intervals, the report illustrates trends and impacts to the technologies and vendors involved in Storage. Wave 7 was conducted in Q1 2006 and is derived from one-on-one interviews with 155 Storage professionals from Fortune 1000 companies. The study includes quantitative information concerning spending, technology usage & adoption plans, and vendor performance, as well as qualitative data in the form of end user commentary.
"Overall Storage Area Network (SAN) spending has contracted this Wave, following the large storage purchasing binge in late 2004 and almost all of 2005," notes Robert Stevenson, the Managing Director of TIP's Storage Practice. Wave 6 (released in the Fall of 2005) found that 42% of the Fortune 1000 sample was planning to spend more on SANs in 2006, and that number has dropped in Wave 7 to 29% who plan to spend more in 2006 (with 26% planning to spend less and 45% planning to spend the same) as Storage professionals focus on productivity, with a common theme in the TIPNetwork becoming storage consolidation. Overall Storage budgets are not increasing at the torrid rate TIP saw last year, with staffing as opposed to hardware or software, the only area where an increase in spending is planned.
The TIP Time Series report identifies a handful of technologies and services benefiting from the desired increase in productivity and move to consolidation by tracking how they positions change in TIP's patent pending Technology Heat and Adoption Indices(TM), which prioritize over 40 different Storage Networking and Management technologies based on user-reported plans for spending and implementation.
-- Wide Area File Services (WAFS) moves from #8 to #3 in the Storage Networking Heat Index(TM) with projects progressing in earnest as part of the overall efforts to centralize remote office data services. Some vendors who have sought to capitalize on this include: Cisco, Riverbed/HP/McDATA, Packeteer/Brocade, Juniper, Silver Peak, Orbital Data, Symantec, and NetApp.
-- File Virtualization moves from #15 to # 6 in the Storage Management Heat Index(TM) spiking three spots ahead of Block Virtualization in Wave 7 as Storage professionals look for migration technologies to assist with the growth pains of managing multi-terabyte file infrastructures. In Wave 7 Storage pros discussed how more and more business processing analytics occurs on Network Attached Storage (NAS) to meet shortening product cycles. Companies benefiting in area include: Acopia, NeoPath Networks, Attune Systems, EMC, NetApp, ONStor, Isilon, IBM, and HDS.
-- Email Management and Archiving is now one of the most widely adopted technologies in Wave 7. Storage pros cite an increase in litigation discovery inquiries, which they feel is an inefficient use of time and a poor match of competencies for many Storage organizations, so there is a growing trend among Fortune 1000 companies Wave over Wave toward outsourcing this function to vendors such as HP, IBM, Iron Mountain, and ZANTAZ.
For a preview of findings visit: www.brainshark.com/theinfopro/storage_w7_time_series
Along with the advancing technologies and trends, the Wave 7 Time Series report also shows a handful of technologies that are being affected by storage professionals' changing needs changing, including:
-- Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), for instance, were a very hot technology in Wave 6 and remain so in Wave 7. However, there is a moderate and growing opinion among end users that de-duplication technologies is a must have component.
-- Fixed Content / Content Addressed Storage (CAS) Arrays appear to be slowing in adoption as Data Classification products promise more robust application integration.
Each Wave TIP asks companies to cite the vendors they think have excited products and technology. In Wave 7 emerging companies like 3PAR, Pillar Data Systems, Compellent, Revivio, MonoSphere. PolyServe, Kazeon, Avamar, Data Domain, Riverbed, Diligent, COPAN, and established ones like NetApp, HDS, EMC, HP, IBM, Cisco, and Sun have showed up on the Exciting Vendors list. Reasons for the selection vary and are detailed in the Narratives report that comes with each TIP study.
This Time Series report includes detailed spending and ratings data on a broad range of vendors in the Storage sector, including EMC, Symantec, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, HPQ, Cisco, HDS, Sun, Oracle, Iron Mountain, CA, COPAN, Creekpath, McDATA, Brocade, 3PAR, Data Domain, BlueArc, LSI, Riverbed, FalconStor, ADIC, Dell, QLogic, Emulex, and more.
For a preview of findings visit: www.brainshark.com/theinfopro/storage_w7_time_series
In addition to Storage Networking and Management, TIP studies the Information Security, Networking, and Server markets. Over 850 technology decision makers are members of the TIPNetwork, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Reed Elsevier, FedEx, MetLife, Merck, Cargill, and MasterCard. To learn more about TIP's independent, objective research process where results are delivered without any analyst spin or bias visit www.theinfopro.net.
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