IT shops in the UK and Europe are spending less money on storage this year for the second year in a row, according to the results of our 2011 SearchStorage.co.UK European storage Purchasing Intentions survey. But significant amounts of money are still being spent. And price is now the key product criterion in many product areas, while perceptions of high price have limited solid-state storage adoption.
The survey, which asked 302 storage professionals representing businesses with an average annual revenue of £896 million about their storage budgets and spending intentions, showed that the biggest chunk of UK and European storage spending goes on disk systems and new disk capacity.
Meanwhile, Fibre Channel deployments have increased in prevalence, especially for virtual server environments, and more people now back up VMs with VMware’s VCB than a traditional backup app.
On the vendor front HP is the most popular vendor for disk systems, disk-based backup and tape libraries, while Brocade eats into Cisco’s dominance in switches.
Read on for the details of our survey. Results are split into three parts: budgets and disk systems, backup, and the rest. You can click to jump to each part or go straight to sections within them below. For information on how the survey was conducted, see “About the SearchStorage.co.UK 2011 storage Purchasing Intentions survey.”
Storage budgets and disk systems
- Users will add an average of 31.5 TB in 2011
- Disk hardware is the biggest storage spend, and, of that, additional disk capacity is the biggest spend
- Fibre Channel deployments are increasing, but NAS is the most commonly installed storage protocol
- SSD prevalence is increasing, but perceptions of high cost are limiting it
- HP is top disk system vendor
- Price is now key in disk system vendor choice
- Server virtualisation has leveled off, and Fibre Channel is the most popular protocol to support it
- Tape use is stable, but fewer libraries are being bought
- Disk-based backup spend is stable, while dedupe spend has leveled off
- About one-fifth use cloud backup
- Backup app spend is stable, features are key to purchases and Symantec is the top backup vendor
- VCB use up, traditional backup app use down for VMs
Switches, green, cloud, compliance, DR, storage security, storage management, storage virtualisation
- Brocade gaining deployments; 8 Gbps FC deployments level off
- The “green” storage wave has peaked but left a lasting impression
- Cloud storage is a minority interest, but DR and online data are popular uses
- DR spending is the same as last year but more is being spent on replication and less on tape
- Storage compliance spending is the same as 2010
- There are no real changes in storage management product spend, but EMC is now the top vendor for our readers
This was first published in July 2011