SMBs Will Get Serious About Storage in 2006, IDC Says

Small to midsize businesses will be hungrier for larger companies' storage offerings as their needs become more complex, according to the IDC report.

Inching their way as a primary target by storage vendors that have traditionally catered to larger enterprises, SMBs are on track to gobble up and deploy more capable storage technology than ever before in 2006, according to a new report released on March 29 by IDC.

According to the IDCs study called "U.S. SMB Storage 2006: The Move to More Advanced Storage Features," small to midsize businesses will be hungrier for larger companies storage offerings as their IT environments and data management needs become more complex.

IDC says that SMB spending on more advanced approaches toward storage technology will fuel that desire and grow over the next 12 months.

These advanced requirements can range from the adoption of simplified and better performing backup and recovery operations from disk-based protection alternatives to tape, as well as efforts by manufacturers to construct more affordable and down-sized storage products that enable less administrative overhead, note analysts from Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

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The new IDC study says that midsize organizations will embrace SAN (storage area network capacity and deployments in larger numbers over the next year.

However, SMBs are not yet at that stage and will continue to show reliance upon internal disks to suit their storage demands.

To read more about Xiotechs scaled-down SAN for SMBs, click here.

Although the number one priority surrounding storage for smaller firms is to push out storage capacity in the next 12 months, by comparison the IDC study points out that midsize businesses plan to bolster their disaster recovery capabilities as their top target.

Those numbers add up as IDC found that midsize companies devote the largest share of their disk storage to backup and recovery in addition to data-intensive applications.

Smaller companies tend to devote the biggest share of their disk storage to lower hanging fruit such as e-mail and digital content.

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