Storage Admins Plan to Spend More on Data Protection in 2011: Survey

Several key IT researchers already have reported that global and U.S. IT spending in 2011 is expected to increase modestly over that of 2010, thanks to an uptick in the general ecomony.

Now some storage-specific market research is coming to the fore. CommVault on Jan. 10 released the results of its IT Storage Spending Survey, which polled a cross-section of more than 350 of its global software customers.

In this survey, nearly 80 percent of storage administrators reported that their IT spending budgets would either be increased slightly or maintained at 2010 levels. About 80 percent of those polled reported that they will allocate as much as 20 percent of their budgets on data-protection hardware, software, services/support and media.

Typically, storage spending involving non-hardware items such as data protection, data monitoring and capacity management constitutes less than 10 percent of yearly budgets. Most storage spending goes into purchases involving hardware, networking, software and maintenance.

"Our customers have been telling us that the continuing data glut is creating undue cost as well as the risk of data loss and business disruption," David West, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development, said.

"They need to fix these problems without dramatically increasing their budgets, which has been a recurring theme for the past several years. In 2011, companies will still need to do more with less, but they're also investing more in modern solutions that solve these real-world IT challenges while leveraging budget allocations to the fullest."

The CommVault survey included professionals responsible for IT budget allocations encompassing storage and data management, including CIOs, vice presidents and IT directors as well as backup, server and storage group managers or administrators.

About 60 percent of the respondents polled for this survey are in organizations with 500 to 10,000 employees and represent a range of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, health care, financial services, engineering and retail.

About 50 percent of the respondents were responsible for managing between 6 to 25 terabytes of primary data last year; 22 percent managed fewer than 25 physical servers, while 24 percent managed fewer than 25 virtual servers currently.