• Larger vendors are leading in choice for infrastructure upgrades, points to potential M&A targets
• Forty percent (40%) of organizations are increasing security budgets in 2010
• Sixty percent (60%) of organizations already utilizing cloud-based infrastructure services or intending to do so in the next two years.

New York – February 23, 2009 – TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, today released the results of its Information Security Study, which showed that 40 percent (40%) of enterprises are planning to increase their 2010 security budgets. After a year of restricted spending and delayed projects, major infrastructure upgrade initiatives are finally happening for security IT departments. The study shows that enterprises are favoring the safety of one-stop, all-inclusive vendors, and consequently, the data shows Cisco rising as a formidable security provider.

Potential M&A Targets
As organizations embark on a comprehensive infrastructure refresh, Cisco is now leading in vendor selection for SSL VPN, network access control (NAC) and firewalls. Inside the perimeter, however, pure-play security companies still reign supreme, which could potentially point to them as suitable M&A targets in the coming months for the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other larger vendors.

“Check Point, McAfee and other similar providers would probably be the largest deals in the acquisition pipeline, each a leader in their respective, mainstream technologies, and each with a loyal customer base,” said Ivan Ruzic, CEO of TheInfoPro. “Smaller deals would most likely happen first, meaning that Blue Coat, WebSense and ArcSight could be to a larger organization what 3Com’s TippingPoint technology meant to HP.”

Key Security Concerns for Cloud
The study results, which are based on interviews with 259 organizations within the Fortune 1000 (F1000) and midsize (MSEs) market throughout North America, showed that 60 percent of organizations are already utilizing cloud-based infrastructure services or intending to do so in the next two years. Due to this growth, the largest area of concern for enterprises is how to deal with sensitive data being placed in not only an external cloud environment but also concern for data that is placed within clouds internal to their respective organizations. Nearly three out of four respondents (72%) cited being very concerned or extremely concerned about security in a cloud environment.

“Even with data pointing to a spending rebound, security professionals say they will spend cautiously and scrutinize each priority after many routine infrastructure updates were delayed,” said Bill Trussell, TheInfoPro’s Managing Director of Security Research. “Emerging trends in virtualization and cloud are driving much attention toward addressing data loss more aggressively.”

Enterprises Gear Spending Toward Protecting Data
For 2010, enterprise security professionals indicate that Symantec, McAfee, Microsoft and Cisco will be among the most likely beneficiaries of higher spending. McAfee has eclipsed Symantec as the most frequently cited provider of exciting security products, while Check Point returned to the list after being absent for more than a year.

TheInfoPro’s Technology Heat Index™ is widely regarded as effective measure of user “demand” for a technology, and from a vendor’s perspective, a good indicator of the relative size of the market opportunity. TheInfoPro’s Information Security Technology Heat Index cites event log management as the No. 1 priority in information security IT spending, with data loss prevention (DLP) and NAC ranking next, respectively.

DLP tops the IT projects list as well as the exciting technology solutions list. Security professionals have identified that both Symantec and McAfee are likely to be the preferred DLP vendors. Cisco and Microsoft still lead for NAC. LogLogic and Microsoft are top choices as vendors for event log management. For the first time in two years, NAC has fallen to the third spot, demonstrating that the technology has moved toward more mainstream adoption.

NOTE: Specific vendor data or full report downloads are available by contacting Ashley Pierce at apierce@theinfopro.com.

About TheInfoPro’s Security Study
TheInfoPro’s Information Security Study was conducted between September and December 2009 and takes an in-depth look into key trends occurring across all areas of the information security landscape, within disciplines such as network security, security management and infrastructure security. The study is completed biannually through one-on-one, hourlong interviews with 259 key security decision-makers, including directors of information security, global security managers and infrastructure team managers, within Fortune 1000 and midsize enterprise organizations. The interview results are collected in comprehensive research reports that provide continuous business intelligence within key areas such as technology roadmaps, spending plans and vendor performance ratings.

About TheInfoPro
TheInfoPro is a leading advisory and research firm that provides real-world perspectives on the customer and market dynamics of the information technology landscape by using a unique research methodology that harnesses the collective knowledge and insights of leading IT organizations worldwide. Through a combination of expert advice, actionable analysis and our extensive network of IT professionals, TheInfoPro serves as a conduit between IT decision-makers, technology providers and institutional investors. Founded in 2002 by alumni of Gartner, Giga, EMC and Bell Labs, TheInfoPro is headquartered in New York City. To learn more, visit www.theinfopro.com or email info@theinfopro.com.
info@theinfopro.com.

International Data Corp. (IDC) recently issued a provocative study proclaiming a period of austerity it’s calling the “new normal”. Based on a survey of 140 CIOs and IT managers from Fortune 1000 companies, it suggests that organizations steel themselves as follows:

• Re-review the 2010 project portfolio. Assume that by mid-year, the funding outlook will turn more conservative. This companies need to look now at how a mid-year reduction in the 2010 capital budget will affect various projects, which ones can be deferred; which cannot.
• For critical projects, ensure there is clear and unambiguous external validation of these projects’ importance. Be able to re-justify to your business colleagues the consequences of deferral―both in terms of strategic impact and operational cost/efficiency.
• Update “Plan B”―the capital budget which assumes lower funding, but do so quietly among your senior staff. It is not the time to rattle the confidence of your troops. As you sit in the normal business meetings which fill so many days, keep in mind that you need to quietly remind your colleagues now of the important projects currently underway and their strategic impact for the organization.

“Changes resulting from the recent economic turbulence are resulting in substantial changes to business and technology management models that will echo for several years, creating a ‘new normal’ for IT budgets, capital availability, and technology adoption models,” said Joseph Pucciarelli, program director, Technology Financial and Executive Strategies at IDC. While foretelling that 2010 will be a bumpy ride, he expects slow to modest growth in most industries. As investment dollars are being scaled back in many areas, IT could well be first in line to feel the pinch.

“By late April and early May, many companies will conclude 2010 will be a tight year and begin scaling back discretionary spending and non-essential projects,” said Pucciarelli. “Personally, I think the mid-year dip will be followed by a relatively robust rebound freeing up capital funding very late in the budget year.”

Because of this, projects that would previously have received the go ahead by showing a two- to three-year payback are being mothballed. Today, only those that can demonstrate an immediate need and ROI within 12 months can be expected to receive the green light. And anything left over won’t go to IT. It will be invested in the business, said Pucciarelli, to projects such as rebuilding the supply chain or adopting a more efficient warehousing system. While not directly IT projects, there is a technology component.

“IT-centric projects with a payback beyond 12 months are simply not on the cards,” said Pucciarelli.

A power distribution unit (PDU) upgrade that circumvents the need for additional premises would be funded, whereas a major rework of the entire cooling infrastructure is likely to be put off. Similarly, big software implementations are in trouble, while processor upgrades which can potentially bring big improvements in performance and a drop in software licensing are more likely to be authorized.

This view is backed up by recent research by TheInfoPro (TIP) of New York City which found a definite slow in big-ticket spending while technologies such as data deduplication are doing well due to the fact that they reduce the amount of primary storage or backup space required.

C-Level Response
So, how are C-level executives taking all this? And do they agree with IDC? Terry Wisner, CFO at TeamQuest Corp. of Clear Lake, Iowa, said his budgeting for the year wasn’t overly optimistic. Far from being exposed to the further constricting of the purse strings, he had already taken a capital-budgeting approach of assessing priorities and required investments, as well as the risk impact to any project deferrals on operations. At the same time, though, he wants to avoid unnecessary delays to ongoing strategy.

“The primary objective for the final capital budget is to implement for the full year to mitigate adverse impact on operations,” said Wisner. “We can no longer afford to derail productive focus in our operations.”

He agrees with IDC that each critical project should have a designated internal customer that relies on the outcome of the project as a critical success factor for their own operations. To ensure delivery and accountability, therefore, he requires that established milestones should be reported to and reviewed with such internal customer as if there were an external customer.

As for Pucciarelli’s advocacy of quiet “Plan B” updates, Wisner disagreed with this tenet of the new normal. His view is that if a company plans wisely and adopts the right strategy, it is better to take a stand, invest in the projects that are crucial to operations.

“If we don’t have this mentality, our competition will be looking in the rear view mirror at us,” said Wisner. “It will come down to who is better operationally prepared to take on the additional market share and demand going forward.”

That said, he sees changes due to recent financial shifts. The “old normal” was one of internally leveraging all company growth from current operations and ensuring profitability. A more conservative “new normal’ means making prioritized and focused investments into operations to position future growth and operational preparedness for such growth to occur. But, he cautions, companies that hunkering down too much could be in trouble. “We will not shrink to greatness.”

Stephen Savage, on the other hand, does anticipate the screws being turned on project spend over the course of the year. As CIO at CA, he is focusing on driving efficiency from the keep the lights on portion of his budget in order to free up capital for new project spend. CA funds projects in two ways. First, there are corporate initiatives that are deemed necessary to either drive growth or meet security and/or compliance concerns. Second, there are initiatives that are funded through the business units.

Through the existing governance process, CA aggregates and prioritizes the project work based on their priority and financial return. With this approach, he said, it is easier to either stretch some projects or delay them based on capital availability.

The new financial reality, he said, has brought about some reevaluation of existing habits and preferences. For example, there is less patience for monolithic projects than there was in the past. “Maintaining capability to do things in house is no longer appropriate―emerging Cloud vendors offer agility and capability more quickly. SaaS and Cloud offerings are increasingly putting pressure on IT to be as agile with its strategic infrastructure.”

Thus CA developed an agreed enterprise architecture that speaks to a defined set of capabilities or applications. Anything ancillary to this is expendable. Internally, the company is focused on the capabilities and applications that support its most strategic initiatives. This approach, he said, enables the use of commodity providers for some of the more tactical projects, thus saving them money.

Differing Prognoses
The prognosis for the remainder of the year varies, of course, based on who you talk to. Michael Nolan, global leader for Risk and Compliance at KPMG International, considers that organizations are operating in a world in which traditional strategies and assumptions are failing. Thus they face ongoing challenges to their old assumptions, and can no longer rely on history to predict the future. His solution is a strong focus on risk management as a means of weathering the storm.
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, advises budget vigilance. Although the economic crisis seems to have stabilized, there are potential problems on the horizon such as continued roiling of other economies like Spain and Greece, an expected meltdown in US commercial real estate and a so-called “jobless recovery.”
“Every project requires the ‘Nth’ degree of justification,” said King. “That means IT management needs to do its homework. If IT vendors claim significant leaps in system or solution performance/efficiency, they better be able to back it up.”
The biggest change the status quo is more and more companies seeking to escape the “automatic upgrade” cycle. Many are discovering that they don’t need shiny new PCs every three years or the latest software updates. They can get by just fine with slightly out-of-date, existing technologies. When they do upgrade, they want tangible proof of the value of new solutions before signing purchase orders.
“That puts a lot more pressure on vendors but should also result in more customer satisfaction,” said King.

Information security budgets will get a boost at many organizations in 2010, according to a study released Tuesday by IT research company TheInfoPro. The study, based on interviews of 259 security decision makers at Fortune 1000 and mid-size organizations, found that 40 percent of enterprises are planning to increase their 2010 security budgets. Data leakage prevention topped the list of projects planned for 2010, followed by identity management and compliance initiatives. — AM

Data dedupe is still a relatively small market, but it’s one that is growing strongly and one that is dominated (76 percent) by direct sales from the likes of EMC and NetApp (hardware) and EMC, Symantec and IBM (software).

According to the latest numbers, data deduplication is one of the hottest technology segments, and it’s only going to get hotter, according to a new study from TheInfoPro that found that the majority of large organizations believe deduplication will have the greatest impact on their storage architectures.

Providing further evidence of dedupe’s momentum, EMC, a leader in both hardware and software deduplication, just reported greater than 50 percent year-over-year growth of both its Data Domain and Avamar dedupe products. And the results of an IDC study report that demand for storage efficiency is driving deduplication adoption and there are growing opportunities for the channel.

More than 60 percent of respondents to an IDC survey are either in the process of deduplicating or have plans to deduplicate their primary, backup, or archive data in the coming year, says Laura DuBois, program director, Storage Software, IDC. The numbers are even better when it comes to buying intentions, with 76 percent intending to spend over the next 12 months.

As for the channel, DuBois thinks the biggest opportunity is changing the existing market dynamics where 76 percent of customers buy directly from the vendor. “I think there is an opportunity to change that.”

Vendors claim you can pack dozens of virtual machines inside one physical server. But that’s a bad idea for heavy-duty applications.

As virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to include mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to-virtual server ratios are things of the past.

Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of putting 20, 50 or even 100 virtual machines (VM) on a single physical machine. But IT managers and industry experts say those ratios are dangerous in production environments and can cause performance problems or, worse, outages.

“In test and development environments, companies could put upwards of 50 virtual machines on a single physical host. But when it comes to mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, that number tends to plummet to less than 15,” says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo.

In a 2009 study of 153 organizations with more than 500 end users, EMA found that, on average, enterprises were achieving 6:1 consolidation rates for applications such as ERP, CRM, e-mail and databases.

The variance between the reality and the expectations, whether it’s due to vendor hype or internal ROI issues, could spell trouble for IT teams. That’s because the consolidation rate affects just about every aspect of a virtualization project — budget, capacity and executive buy-in. “If you go into these virtualization projects with a false expectation, you’re going to get in trouble,” Mann says.

Indeed, overestimating physical-to-virtual ratios can result in the need for more server hardware, rack space, cooling capacity and power consumption — all of which cost money. Worse yet, users could be affected by poorly performing applications. “If a company thinks they’re only going to need 10 servers at the end of a virtualization project and they actually need 15, it could have a significant impact on the overall cost of the consolidation and put them in the hole financially. Not a good thing, especially in this economy,” says Charles King, president and principal analyst at consultancy Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif.

Why is there a disconnect between virtualization expectations and reality? King says that up to this point, many companies have focused on virtualizing low-end, low-use, low-I/O applications such as test, development, log, file and print servers. “When it comes to edge-of-network, non-mission-critical applications that don’t require high availability, you can stack dozens on a single machine,” he says.

Bob Gill, an analyst at TheInfoPro Inc., agrees. “Early on, people were virtualizing systems that had a less-than-5% utilization rate. These were the applications that, if they went down for an hour, no one got upset,” he says.

That’s not the case when applying virtualization to mission-critical, resource-intensive applications — and virtualization vendors, on the whole, have been slow to explain this reality to customers, according to some analysts.

Once you consider applications with higher utilization rates, greater security risks, and increased performance and availability demands, consolidation ratios drop off considerably. “These applications will compete for bandwidth, memory, CPU and storage,” King says. Even on machines with two quad-core processors, highly transactional applications that have been virtualized will experience network bottlenecks and performance hits as they vie for the same server’s pool of resources.

Here are four tips for avoiding server overload.

1. Start With Capacity Analysis
To combat the problem, IT teams have to rejigger their thinking and dial back everyone’s expectations. The best place to start: a capacity analysis, says Kris Jmaeff, information security systems specialist at the Interior Health Authority, a British Columbia government agency.

Four years ago, the data center at Interior Health was growing at a rapid clip. There was a lot of pressure to virtualize the 500-server production environment to support a host of services, including DNS, Active Directory, Web servers, FTP, and many production application and database servers.

Before starting down that path, Jmaeff first used VMware tools to conduct an in-depth capacity analysis that monitored server hardware utilization. (Similar tools are also available from Cirba, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, PlateSpin and Vizioncore, among others.) Rather than looking at his hardware environment piece by piece, he instead considered everything as a pool of resources. “Capacity planning should focus on the resources that a server can contribute to the virtual pool,” Jmaeff says.

Already, the team has been able to consolidate 250 servers — 50% of the server farm — onto 12 physical hosts. And while Jmaeff’s overall average data center ratio is 20:1, hosts that hold more-demanding applications either require much lower ratios or require that he balance out resource-intensive applications.

Jmaeff uses a combination of VMware vCenter and IBM Director to monitor each VM for telltale signs of ratio imbalances such as spikes in RAM and CPU usage, or performance degradation. “We’ve definitely had to bump applications around and adjust our conversion rates according to server resource demand to create a more balanced workload,” he says. If necessary, it’s easy to clone servers and quickly spread the application load, he adds.

“Because we did our homework with ratios of virtual servers by examining the load on CPU and memory and evaluated physical server workloads, we’ve been pleasantly surprised with our ratios,” Jmaeff says.

2. Monitor Performance Continuously
At Network Data Center Host Inc., a Web service provider in San Clemente, Calif., the IT team quickly learned that when it comes to virtualizing mission-critical applications, you have to consider more than just RAM. “We originally thought, based on available RAM, we could have 40 small customers share a physical server. But we found that with heavier-used applications, it’s not the RAM, it’s the I/O,” says Chief Technology Officer Shaun Retain.

The 40:1 ratio had to be pulled back to no greater than 20:1, he says. To help with that effort, the team has developed a control panel that allows customers to log in and see how their virtual machines are handling reads, writes, disk space usage and other performance-affecting activity. In addition, NDC Host uses homegrown monitoring tools to ensure that ratios aren’t blown by a spike in a single VM’s traffic.

3. Test for Application Stability
King says companies should also conduct rigorous testing on their virtualized mission-critical applications before and after deployment. “You have to make sure that in terms of memory and network bandwidth, each application is stable at all times. For instance, if you know an application is harder-hit during certain times of the year, you’ll want to account for that in establishing your ratios,” he says.

Testing will also help IT teams determine which virtual workloads will coexist best on a physical host. “You have to make sure that a physical server isn’t running multiple VMs with the same workload. Otherwise, if they’re all Web servers, they will be contending for the same resources at the same time, and that will hinder your consolidation ratio,” says Nelson Ruest, co-author of Virtualization: A Beginner’s Guide and founder of Resolutions Enterprises, a consultancy in Victoria, British Columbia. Instead, IT staffers should make sure that workloads are heterogeneous and well balanced based on peak usage times and resource demands.

Ruest also warns IT teams not to forget the spare resources that host servers need so they can not only support their own VMs, but also accept the workload from a failing host. “If you’re running all your servers at 80%, you won’t be able to support that necessary redundancy,” he says.

Most organizations will find that they need to dedicate at least a month to the capacity planning and testing phases to determine the appropriate physical-to-virtual server ratio for their environment, Ruest says.

4. Get Real-world Benchmarks From Peers
Finally, EMA’s Mann advises IT teams to get involved in local user groups or attend large annual conferences, like VMware’s VMworld or Citrix’s Synergy, to meet peers with similar application environments. “Most attendees are more than willing to share information about their environment and experiences,” he says. Rather than relying on vendor benchmarks, get real-world examples of what has worked and what hasn’t at organizations with profiles similar to yours. “You’ll have a better chance at setting realistic expectations.”

Gittlen is a freelance technology writer in the Boston area. Contact her at sgittlen@verizon.net.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld’s print edition. It’s an edited version of an article that first appeared on Computerworld.com.

TheInfoPro Wave 13 Storage Study Identifies Thin Provisioning as One of the Hottest Technologies in Storage.

3PAR says that virtualised storage provisioning/thin provisioning ranked #1 on the Storage Management Technology Heat® Index—which gauges the immediacy of user needs and planned spending for storage management technologies—compiled as part of the Storage Study recently released by TheInfoPro (TIP). Among the key findings of the study, thin provisioning was also identified as one of the top end-user storage management priorities, and one which addresses all three of the top pain points identified by Fortune-1000 storage professionals participating in the study. These pain points were: managing storage growth, capacity demand forecasting, and managing storage costs.

A storage virtualisation technology developed for primary storage capacity reduction, thin provisioning has been increasingly deployed as datacentres have come under pressure to do more with less. Among study participants, the use of thin provisioning grew 30% since TheInfoPro’s previous storage study, which was conducted six months prior. Over this same period, the number of respondents that had implemented thin provisioning in their datacentres or had plans to do so grew by more than 12%.

“Although Wave 13 participants clearly indicated that budgetary shrinkage is decelerating, the economic pressures of a down economy have continued to influence storage virtualisation technology adoption uptake,” said Robert Stevenson, managing director of storage research for TheInfoPro. “Budget pressure has made thin provisioning one of the hottest technologies in storage as organisations continue to focus on improving storage capacity utilisation and easing storage management. And an overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that, architecturally, the best place for thin provisioning to reside is within the array rather than a block virtualisation appliance, the server virtualisation machine, or host volume services.”

Since introducing 3PAR Thin Provisioning 2002, 3PAR has been a leading provider of thin provisioning software. In October of 2009, 3PAR upped the ante by announcing the introduction of a new suite of thin software products that use the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server’s Thin Built In™ hardware architecture to further slash technology refresh and ongoing storage costs by up to 60%. According to private research recently conducted by 3PAR through TechValidate (www.techvalidate.com), 100% of participating 3PAR Utility Storage customers able to quantify their savings said that over the previous 12 months they had reduced storage capacity purchases and associated CAPEX by at least 25% as a result of moving to 3PAR Utility Storage.

Following up on these new thin technology introductions, in January of this year 3PAR introduced the Get Thin Guarantee Program, which guarantees capacity savings of at least 50% to 3PAR Utility Storage customers converting from fully allocated “fat” volumes on legacy storage to thin volumes on any 3PAR InServ Storage Server with Thin Built In™. Under the terms of the program, 3PAR guarantees participating customers that they will halve the amount of raw capacity required to store existing data—in effect through storage capacity “liposuction”—or 3PAR will make up for the shortfall with free additional disk capacity, software, and support.

“For service providers, enterprises, and government agencies seeking the financial benefits of primary storage capacity reduction, thin provisioning is a proven technology, and 3PAR customers have shown results from deploying it,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “3PAR has continued to demonstrate leadership in array-based thin provisioning innovation, which end users have acknowledged is architecturally superior to bolt-on approaches. Not only is 3PAR the first storage vendor to build thin technologies into the hardware architecture of our arrays, but we are also the only storage vendor to offer a comprehensive strategy that includes technologies for starting thin, getting thin, and staying thin.”

Survey suggests companies are spending significant dollars on thin provisioning and data de-duplication technology. ”It’s a little bit of back to the future,” says an analyst.

Managers in charge of IT dollars at corporations around the U.S. and Europe are focused on buying technology that can optimize systems they are already using, according to a study by TheInfoPro.

For example, the study concluded that companies are spending significant dollars on thin provisioning, which allocates storage capacity on an as-needed basis for apps, and data de-duplication technology, which eliminates duplicate files or blocks of data either at the primary storage layer or during backups.

On the other hand, the New York research firm’s survey found that few companies are deploying new business applications, which would, in-turn, drive new data storage technology purchases.

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

TheInfoPro’s study, which is based on interviews with storage decision makers in North America and Europe, revealed that while 45 per cent of Fortune 1000 respondents plan to increase storage spending in the coming months, 29 per cent still expect major budget cuts. In contrast, 41 per cent of midsized enterprises plan to increase storage spending this year, while 25 per cent expect further budget reductions.

Among the top technologies in TheInfoPro’s so-called “Heat Indexes”, which identify trends in early technology adoption for both Fortune 1000 and mid-sized enterprises, were: E-mail archiving, information lifecycle management and storage resource management systems, said Ken Male, TheInfoPro’s executive vice-chairman.

The average Fortune 1000 company has about 1.2 petabytes of disk-based data storage capacity today, so anything that will help manage the data tsunami or trim excess data is hot, Male added.

“Those technologies are top of mind because budgets are so tight right now,” Male said. “It’s a little bit of back to the future. These were technologies folks were interested in a few years ago and are becoming popular again because they help to forestall additional IT purchases. We’re seeing smaller spends on things that will bring a fast ROI (return on investment).”

TheInfoPro’s study found that IT managers are interested in solid state drives (SSD), but concluded that sales won’t take off this year. According to Male, only about 50 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies currently have SSD technology earmarked in their future technology spending plans. “There’s interest, but it’s not as top of mind as the market would like to say it is,” he said.

TheInfoPro’s survey did find a trend toward the adoption of automated data tiering and automated data provisioning, as well as backup virtualization management, or being able to manage the backup of an entire data center’s virtual server environment from a single console.

To take advantage of that trend, EMC Corp, rolled out its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology across its Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra line of storage arrays, while IBM introduced additions to its XIV grid storage system and its automated tiering capability.

“Hitachi Data Systems is working on automated tiering technology as well,” Male said.

Another hot area for upcoming spending is 8 Gigabit per second Fibre Channel and virtual server data management, which leaves Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) deployment lagging, TheInfoPro found.

Male said data transfer protocols that converge LAN and storage area network (SAN) traffic, such as the FCoE and iSCSI protocols, are gaining popularity, but that significant market adoption won’t take place until late 2011. “We are seeing more of IP-SAN [such as iSCSI] and NAS [network-attached storage] getting more mind share as storage for virtual servers,” he said.

Male said for the next 18 months or so, IT decision makers are choosing to continue using 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, or will be moving to 8Gbit/sec Fibre Channel.

“People are very comfortable right now with 4Gbit Fibre Channel,” he said. “They’ll go to 8Gbit when they begin doing refreshes.”

January 25, 2010 – Results from a recent end-user survey conducted by TheInfoPro research firm included a few surprises regarding what technologies are “hot” and which vendors will be “winners” this year. TheInfoPro surveyed and interviewed storage professionals in the Fortune 1000 (F1000), as well as midsize enterprises (MSEs).

According to TheInfoPro’s Heat Index, which measures user demand for technologies — as well as the relative size of market opportunities for vendors — data deduplication and primary storage data reduction (or online data reduction) will top the needs of both F1000 companies and MSEs in 2010.

The data deduplication entry was predictable, but users’ prioritization of data reduction technologies for primary storage came as somewhat of a surprise to me.

Not for Anders Lofgren, TheInfoPro’s chief research officer. “It’s not surprising, because the emphasis is still on cost reduction. It’s all about managing capital costs on the hardware side and managing operating costs on the staffing side,” says Lofgren.

The list is growing, but early entrants in the online data reduction space include EMC and NetApp, as well as vendors such as Exar, greenBytes, and Storwize. (See “Consider data reduction for primary storage” ). In TheInfoPro survey, not surprisingly, EMC and NetApp were mentioned most frequently.

Also ranking high in the TheInfoPro’s Heat Index were the F1000’s planned use of solid-state disk (SSD) drives, 8Gbps Fibre Channel, and virtual server data management.

TheInfoPro’s Heat Indexes also indicate increased use of technologies such as thin provisioning, email archiving, information lifecycle management (ILM), storage resource management (SRM), automated tiering and provisioning, and backup management for virtual servers. Among SMEs, interest in block virtualization is picking up steam, and MSEs plan to expand their use of remote replication, 10GbE, and enterprise-class SAS drives.

Who are the “most exciting” storage vendors in 2010? Among MSEs, the top picks were somewhat surprising: Compellent, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems. The top three “in use” vendors were EMC, NetApp and Compellent.

Among Fortune 1000 firms, the most exciting storage vendors are EMC, NetApp and IBM. The InfoPro noted that:

–The acquisition of Data Domain boosted EMC’s data deduplication “in use” share in the Fortune 1000 from about 5% to 25%.

–In the F1000 space, EMC’s V-Max refresh rates appear to be driving the majority of SSD discussions. For example, SSD “in use” responses quadrupled from six months ago (albeit from a base of near zero).

–In email archiving, Symantec, EMC and IBM consistently placed at the top of end users’ lists. IBM’s “in use” activity in the F1000 grew the fastest, compared to TheInfoPro’s survey of six months ago, while both Symantec and CommVault also showed significant improvement.

Visit TheInfoPro’s site for more insights from the firms’ ongoing end-user surveys.

The in-depth study reveals that while 45% of F1000 respondents plan to increase storage spending in the coming months, 29% still expect major budget decreases. In contrast, 41% of MSEs plan to increase storage spending this year, while 25% expect further reductions.

Of the 300 plus interviews conducted, most show that 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.

For more specifics on the data, please visit:  http://www.theinfopro.com/2010/01/tippr-012510/