Despite the struggling economy, data storage as a whole, has posted another year of budget growth. A recent, IBM-sponsored survey of over 883 storage administrators reveals a 1.8% increase in their storage budgets as of spring, 2012. Large corporations, with over 1-billion in revenues saw their storage budgets increase by 3.0%. Smaller companies saw a storage budget increase of just 1.2%. This is an encouraging number for small businesses who have actually experienced negative storage budgets in the recent past. While these budget figures for storage appear to be trending upwards, is it actually enough to handle the current data requirements of enterprise and small business? Maybe Not…
Are Storage Budgets Large Enough?
Okay, we can all agree that technology budget growth is good – it indicates the ability and willingness of a company to move forward. Budget growth, however, doesn’t always mean enough. Based on the survey, storage managers are getting a little bit antsy, nervous and downright irritable over having to find ways to squeeze every megabyte of data they can out of these constrained, budgets. On average, storage administrators are managing 263 Terabytes of data capacity. That number may sound huge, but the requirement continues to rapidly increase at a pace that cannot be comfortably met by most of these 2012 budget numbers. The average data storage budget from the survey is around $3 million dollars.
Storage Budgets Falling Short
Here’s where the problem is: according to survey respondents, installed data capacity is 5% higher than it was a year ago on average. Even for the larger companies with 3% storage budgets, their falling short of their actual requirements. As opposed to larger companies, small businesses are running an average of 77 terabytes of installed data capacity. Smaller business are in fact, cranking out as much storage as enterprise businesses were a few years ago. Enterprise-Class businesses plan on adding an average of 94TB per year; mid-sized companies 43TB per year and small businesses are growing at 22TB of storage capacity each year. If this is the kind of storage growth we are seeing in a struggling economy, we can only imagine what it will be like when things get better. Storage Administrators, though, look forward to having the budget to account for the inevitable growth.
