Storage top priority to organisations

Companies say maintaining and improving storage is priority

Maintaining or improving performance levels is the top storage strategy for large German organisations in 2009, according to a survey by Gartner.

Gartner’s latest end-user survey showed that in Germany, 59 per cent of respondents expect their storage hardware budget to increase or remain the same in 2009 compared with 2008.

The survey found that 48 per cent of the German participants said that their projects would be implemented in 2009 as planned. In addition, 87 per cent of the respondents reported no cancellation of IT projects since October 2008 as a result of the financial crisis.

When specifically asked about the level of green IT investments in 2009, 76 per cent of respondents in Germany stated that their investment will remain the same or increase and this compares to 82 per cent from other countries around the world.

Additional storage priorities for German organisations in 2009 included “implementing or improving backup and recovery” and “increasing data security.” Even in times of budget cuts ‘acquiring more serial-attached small computer system interface (SAS)/serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drives to meet capacity requirements’ rated higher than ‘increasing storage use to delay capacity purchase’.

Incumbent vendors remained the preferred vendor of choice for German organisations in 2009. German organisations gave preference to reputation, technical capability and relationship with the vendor over price as even in such difficult times low bid prices were the least preferred strategy in Germany.