In the opening three months of 2003, in the midst of an economic slowdown, organisations as a whole increased their storage capacity by a stunning 49%, buying in that quarter an additional 175.6 petabytes of free space.
In any other industry that kind of growth in capacity would be regarded as wildly extravagant, even reckless. But not in storage, where disk drive makers have continued to find ways of packing more data into smaller spaces and to build drives for less money. That makes for a tough equation for vendors. Just to stand still, some vendors are finding that they must increase the capacity of their machines by 50% or more a year.
Moreover, in the past two years, customers have been making use of some of the storage overcapacity they bought in healthier and less-constrained economic times, and that has caused a deep recession in the sector that is only now ending. The notion of a recession in an era when applications such as email, data warehousing and call centre conversation capture are driving soaring storage requirements is yet another illogical twist.
As analyst Charlotte Rancourt of IDC puts it: “The growth in gigabyte per unit does not offset the unrelenting decline in dollar per gigabyte.”
However, the changes in buying patterns have created something of a breathing space for customers and vendors alike, and both are taking advantage of that to embrace network storage. That is already turning out to be the next big wave of investment for customers, who value the structure it brings to storage management as well as the clear business benefits that it delivers.
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