Our Readers Weather The Storage Surge

Despite reports that storage demand is growing out of control, significant numbers of eWEEK readers have steady or decreasing disk needs, according to our online poll.

Analysts regularly find that storage needs are a major concern for IT managers, with predicted growth rates of 40 to 6o percent. However, despite predictions of panic, an online poll of eWEEK Europe readers’ storage needs found that more than a quarter are using the same storage or less this year, compared with last year.

Who needs more storage?

Of course, there is plenty of evidence that the growth is real. A substantial number of readers have growing needs for storage, with 38 percent saying your capacity has had to increase by between 25 percent and 100 percent.

Some (14 percent) have actually more than doubled their data demands – which must have been quite a task, and we hope you managed the expansion smoothly and easily.

However, 22 percent of you say your storage is steady, and five percent say they are actually storing less data this year than last year – a result which we think shows that a large proportion of our readers have the situation well under control, thank you.

Of course, economic factors are playing a part here. The storage market as a whole surged in 2010, following some lean times when the recession cut storage budgets in 2009.

And the actual breakdown within storage spending is changing. As the cost-per-terabyte falls, storage managers are having to spend increasing amounts on data protection. Overall, the world now has room for more than 295 exabytes of data, and we think you are doing a good job of managing it!

Tell us about performance management

Our next poll is one for the network managers. While network performance can be measured reasonably easily, what users really see is peaks and troughs in the end-to-end response and availability of their applications – so your job is performance management.

We want to know your top priorities for performance management. Do you need to monitor applications, troubleshoot them, oprimise your WAN, or perpare for the big changes that are coming in your IT.

This time you can tick as many boxes as you want – and as always you can add your own answers. This poll is sponsored by Riverbed.