The Storage Economist

Like most people, I am hopeful that the long, dark 15-18-month IT recession is over. I like to read all the optimistic articles pointing to a comeback.

I also tend to read all the opposing articles that report that today is not that day.

You can find views on both sides of the arguments, but here are a few….

Working this month in Melbourne, Hong Kong and Tokyo, I have a few observations of my own:

• There is pent-up demand for storage resources. The capital hold-back over the past year is starting to break free
• Unfortunately, CxO still see un-utilized capacity and are insisting that more effort be used to break free and use existing capacity
• I see some interesting trade-offs with performance for capacity, in relation to saving money. The re-emergence of JBOD is a good example of some moves to get away from the costs of ruggedized disk and storage networks (penny smart and pound foolish)
• As long as unemployment is high, capital spending will be checked. But not all parts of the world (Australia and China for example) are experiencing high unemployment or negative/flat GDP
• 3G/4G expansion is helping the Telco segment to surge is data storage requirements all over the planet. Not that this vertical will alone help a rebound, but this is one high growth area
• Many government projects, from health and human services, census, taxation, and the horde of legal documents is another area of particular growth and interest
• Western banks continue to reclaim, reclaim, reclaim. Many far east banks (that did not have all the surplus) are really starting to make investments for growth and expansion
• The451 said this best – “Storage managers will begin to ask more questions about how they can use storage virtualization to gain the same efficiency savings and flexibility that they are gaining through server virtualization”
• The virtualization of servers continues to spur the virtualization of storage, networks and desktops. This presents a real opportunity, not for commodity disk, but for all the virtualization infrastructure and expertise
• We might like to see the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley, but with big-government focusing on bad-behavior corporations, that may not likely happen anytime soon. Yet - all the IT investments for compliance have really slipped off the radar for most IT planners

My favorite concern is a double-dip recession. If enough perfect storm elements align in the next 3-6 weeks, and the indices from China, Japan, US, London and Germany head south we will see another round of capital tightening. This will be true of most private sector capital planners.

Double dip or not, most storage planners are still cautious, and looking to exploit all options to defer expenses into this new year. The turn-over of a calendar page does not always open to a new page in the checkbook. Cautious-optimism and pessimism abound. In the end, we have to do more to optimize and utilize what we already have in-house.