Compellent Conference-goers Offer Their Takes on Trends

Storage area network-maker Compellent’s annual C-Drive Conference in Minneapolis is always a first-class event. The Station moderated a panel discussion there last year and was all set to go again this time until a family health issue came up. Sigh. Maybe next year.

At its May 2009 conference, Compellent did some polling of attendees during keynote presentations and general sessions during the five-day event to help forecast technology trends. It turned up some interesting information.

• 91 percent of business partners and 78 percent of customers responded “important,” “very important” or “critical” when asked: “What is your level of interest in evaluating SSD in your environment?”
• 70 percent of customers said balancing budget requirements and technology needs was the top challenge facing IT today.
• When asked: “What are the barriers to adopting a virtualized environment?”, 27 percent of customers said cost/budget, 22 percent said staff and training and 26 percent said internal politics.
• 62 percent of customers said that the economic climate has impacted their storage spending.
• When asked, “Are you able to measure power consumption in your data center?”, 40 percent of customers said they can today, 17 percent said they will have the capabilities within one year, 5 percent said they are between one and two years away from being able to measure power consumption, and 35 percent said they have no current plans to do so.
• What would have been your responses to those questions?
  And that’s our “Take It to the Bank” storage information nugget of the day.