CommVault Annual IT Storage Spending Predictions Survey

CommVault released the results of its IT Storage Spending Survey, which polled a cross-section of 295 respondents.

This included individuals responsible for IT budget allocations encompassing storage and data management such as CIOs, vice presidents and IT directors, as well as backup, server and storage group managers or administrators.

According to the survey results, managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) is the top budget priority for 2012, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software, data backup and recovery and backup of virtual server environments. These priorities are almost identical to those cited in 2011 Storage Spending Survey.

Also similar to 2011, respondents predicted a slight increase in overall IT budgets for the New Year. Thirty-two percent of the survey respondents revealed their IT budgets would increase in 2012, while 50 percent stated their budgets would remain unchanged in the coming year. Of that IT budget, 43 percent of those polled reported allocating up to 10 percent for overall data protection, for items such as hardware, software, services/support and media, while another 34 percent planned to spend between 11 and 20 percent of their budget on overall data protection.

IT budgets may be on the rise, but most organizations will have to weather the data deluge with their current IT staff. Of those surveyed, 54 percent reported no expected increases in IT headcount in 2012; 16 percent expected an increase and 29 percent remained undecided on increasing their staffing in 2012.

Data growth is being fueled in part by the continued adoption of server virtualization as organizations consolidate physical servers in an effort to reduce costs. Eighty-two percent of respondents are managing up to 250 virtual servers today, but an overwhelming 89 percent of respondents expect that number to increase in 2012.

Fifty-seven percent of the respondents polled came from organizations with between 500 to 10,000 employees, representing a variety of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail. Nearly 50 percent of the respondents were responsible for managing 11 to 75 TBs of primary data last year.

Optimizing IT Budgets with Simpana
CommVault customers continue to embrace Simpana software to address their IT challenges while making the most of their IT budgets and alleviating the challenges that come with managing and protecting massive amounts of data.

Simpana software is one product suite built on a single platform to manage and protect data and information across heterogeneous applications, hypervisors, operating systems and infrastructure from a single console.

CommVault’s policy-driven data management platform protects, stores and recovers vast amounts of data while automating administration. The ability to eliminate manual processes and seamlessly tier data to physical, virtual and cloud storage decreases administrative costs and increases operational efficiencies, letting IT departments do more with fewer resources.

Being a software company to offer a single platform approach to data and information management, CommVault provides unified capabilities for backup and recovery, replication, archive, enterprise search, as well as eDiscovery and compliance workflow.

With Simpana 9, CommVault has also simplified its licensing model to provide customers nearly unlimited use of advanced features while charging only for the amount of front-end capacity being protected. Customers maintain visibility into capacity and growth with usage and trending dashboards to help them manage storage budgets more efficiently.

David West, senior vice president of marketing and business development for CommVault, said: "The results of CommVault’s annual IT storage spending predictions survey reinforce what we hear from customers on a daily basis. Data growth continues to accelerate unabated with the rise of virtual servers, mobile devices and the use of social media in the workplace. Organizations continue to turn to CommVault to address these challenges while reducing risk, controlling costs and accelerate access to valuable business information."