Applied Research recently surveyed 400 companies with 1000 or more employees and uncovered that 12% of them found that there is no way that their business could survive another 24 months without buying more storage. Conversely, 15% said they could go “cold turkey” without buying any more storage capacity for that same period of time. But the majority of companies (over 70%) are unsure if they need more storage capacity and, if they do, what tier of storage capacity they need. This uncertainty around what to do next probably explains the recent increases in storage utilization that companies have experienced in the last six (6) months as well as the renewed interest that companies are expressing in better managing their existing storage capacity.
Last fall’s annual State of the Data Center survey commissioned by Symantec uncovered that storage utilization actually dropped from ~60% in 2007 to closer to 50% in 2008. But in the six (6) months or so since that survey was completed, this new survey detected that a reversal in storage utilization rates has already occurred with storage utilization rates once again climbing to over 60% among the 400 companies contacted in this survey.
Short term, this change is probably attributable to the current macroeconomic environment that has forced companies to stop buying storage because their IT budgets were slashed. The upside of this is that companies are no longer installing new storage capacity so they can take a renewed look at what new technologies are available that might help them better manage their storage infrastructure going forward. Some technologies that these organizations cited in the survey that they are implementing or planning to implement to bring their storage under control include:
- Archiving as a means to free up storage capacity on primary storage
- Deduplication to help them to reduce their overall data stores
- Software to help them manage and/or report on their storage environment
Of these three technologies, these companies have already widely adopted email and file archiving. 52% have already implemented email and file archiving in some fashion with an additional 26% and 24% stating that they plan to implement email and file archiving respectively in 2009. While the survey did not get into the rationale as to why companies are so aggressively implementing archiving, other DCIG blogs explain the benefits associated with these two forms of archiving. At a high level, archiving helps companies lower the storage costs of their primary storage systems, improve application performance, improve an organization’s ability to respond to eDiscovery requests and reduce backup and restore windows.
The increased corporate use of deduplication as a means to help reduce storage costs should come as no surprise to anyone either. Considering that deduplication only reached critical mass in the last few years, a high percentage (32%) of the companies surveyed has already implemented deduplication while the rest of the companies are at least discussing deduplication if not already in some stage of implementing it, testing it or planning for its deployment. Of those that have deployed it, they are finding its justification self-evident with everyone responding that they were able to free up at least some existing storage and over 40% responding that they freed up over 50% of existing storage capacity.
The survey was, however, a bit vague in terms of where in their environment companies are deploying deduplication. I made the assumption that most are deploying it as a mechanism to reduce the amount of data in their archived and backup data stores since I doubt few if any are yet deduplicating data stores on their production systems.
The final area that stood out in this survey was how companies plan to change their budget allocations and technology purchases going forward in 2009 in regards to storage software. Fully 46% indicated that it was “Very likely” that they would allocate extra budget to software to realize savings in hardware purchases over the next 1 – 2 years while another 41% indicated that it was “Somewhat likely” they would increase their budget for storage software.
The motivation behind this increase in storage software spending is probably best reflected in their answers to another question. While only 6% said that their “storage waste is so high it’s a disaster”, fully 73% responded by saying that they either really struggle to utilize what storage they have or admitted that they have adequate storage but its utilization could be better.
Based on my own experience, that’s where I find most organizations are at when it comes to storage management. When times are good and budgets are flowing, it’s faster and easier to just throw more storage capacity at the problem than analyze how they are spending it and what they are spending it one – and this is frequently what apparently occurred in 2008.
But as companies tighten the purse strings in 2009, it appears they want more justifications for the dollars that they do spend and are expending more on storage software to provide these justifications as well as get more bang for the buck for the technology that they buy. So while the survey indicates that companies will still spend money on storage hardware and software in 2009 (and apparently even more money on both than they did in 2008), they are now demanding justification for every dollar they spend regardless of what they spend it. On this survey, archiving, deduplication and storage software are showing up on the plates of these companies as the best way to achieve these desired results