The recession has forced enterprises to look at their storage infrastructure and focus on reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. Customers have been careful with their storage spending and are looking at solutions which will help them effectively utilize their storage resources.

The average storage utilization levels in the industry, typically hover in the range of 35-40%, which means that there is significant headroom to get more out of the installed capacity without increasing the IT spend. With technologies like de-duplication, flexible clones and thin provisioning, enterprises are improving the utilization levels to 65-70%, thereby giving them the ability to achieve 'more with less'.

The Recession Affect

The recessionary period accentuated the significance of storage and protection of data across businesses, and at a lower price point than ever before. It was required to reduce the cost per GB of storage. With businesses having to trim IT spends and provide better SLAs to business units, a shift was seen from the traditional approaches of storage procurement. Increasingly, organizations are deploying unified storage with support for NAS, FC & ISCSI on the same box.

There was a heightened need to squeeze more out of the same box than ever before, leading to extensive deployment of technology like de-duplication, thin and dynamic provisioning and archival solution. With storage becoming more complex, it is now, more than ever, being seen as a separate vertical within IT departments alongside network and systems.

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