NEW YORK, USA: After a year of heavy server and storage consolidation that slowed big-ticket spending throughout IT organizations, TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, released new data showing further effects of the recession on Fortune 1000 (F1000) and midsize enterprise (MSE) storage organizations.

Data Dedupe: So much with so little!

The study reveals that while 45 percent of F1000 respondents plan to increase storage spending in the coming months, 29 percent still expect major budget decreases.

In contrast, 41 percent of MSEs plan to increase storage spending this year, while 25 percent expect further reductions.

Rob Stevenson, managing director, storage research, TheInfoPro, said: “Major spending increases won’t resume until new business application installs once again create massive demands on storage needs. In the interim, storage shops will focus on productivity improvement and hardware inventory adjustments to prepare for virtualization and cloud support needs.”

The study further added that deduplication and primary storage data reduction were topping the needs of the F1000 and MSEs. The F1000 respondents' planned use of solid-state disk (SSD), 8Gbps fibre channel and virtual server data management also showed up well.

Moreover, there is an increasing importance among the F1000 and MSEs of thin provisioning, email archiving, information lifecycle management and storage resource management.
 
There is a clear trend toward an expansion of automated tiering and provisioning, and back-up virtualization management. Also of particular interest is the growth in block virtualization MSEs are planning in 2010.

MSE storage decision-makers plan to expand remote replication; 10GbE networking and enterprise serial-attached SCSI (SAS).

The current study shows that each of the F1000’s most exciting vendors – EMC, NetApp and IBM – had a good year in 2009.

EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain boosted EMC’s deduplication in use share of the F1000 from around five percent to 25 percent.
 
Among the F1000 organizations interviewed, EMC’s V-Max refresh rates appear to be driving the majority of the SSD discussions. In use responses quadrupled from six months ago.

Symantec, EMC and IBM appear consistently in the top five solution providers list for email archiving. IBM’s in use activity in the F1000 grew the fastest compared to the previous study, while both Symantec and CommVault showed considerable improvement.

Among MSEs, Compellent, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems are seen as being among the most exciting vendors, while the top three in use leaders are EMC, NetApp and Compellent.

Among the F1000, EMC, NetApp and IBM top the most exciting technology list. However, NetApp, EMC, IBM and HDS are all in a close race for dominance in virtualized provisioning, with EMC having a slight edge.