Storage spending at a crossroads

Weaning yourself off a storage spending addiction is likely as difficult as quitting smoking. But whereas tobacco companies bear much of the fault for cigarette addiction, it would be unfair to ascribe the unstoppable increase in storage spending to storage vendors alone.

[ Mario  Apicella’s column is now a blog! Get the latest storage news at the Storage Adviser blog. ]

Regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) — which outline discovery rules for electronic records in the event of litigation — are doing their part to feed the spending beast by increasingly tying storage to management operations that, in turn, require even greater levels of purchasing, both in terms of capacity and tools.

It’s little wonder, then, why a recent InfoWorld survey on storage practices found data security and compliance among the primary challenges facing IT. In the era of FRCP, ensuring compliance while protecting valuable data assets is a combined effort that all companies must now undertake.

How they allocate expenditures to solve this problem, however, differs greatly according to their size.

Larger companies tend to increase infrastructure expenditures, buying more hardware and licensing additional specialized software. By contrast, smaller companies tend to favor services, as these organizations are less inclined to add the management overhead that new software and hardware purchases require.

This week, two newsworthy announcements typify how vendors are adjusting to meet those distinct secure-and-assure-compliance demands.

Take, for example, Google’s not-so-sudden love for Postini, a courtship that began in February and has since been sweetened by a bouquet that will be worth $625 million when the acquisition is complete.

Obviously, Google is betting that more and more customers will be attracted by Postini’s comprehensive set of services, which include protection from malware, as well as the ability to track and search e-mail and IM to ensure regulatory compliance. The fact that those services complement Google’s so well is just icing on the cake.

For customers who would rather keep their assets in their datacenter, however, CommVault has announced Simpana 7.0, a suite of management apps that adds a bevy of new features, including indexing and browser-based search of archived data, single-instance storage, and data classification — an increasingly essential e-discovery capability.

Both CommVault and Postini target midsize and larger companies, but a recent partnership with Iomega brings Postini’s services within range of smaller firms. In fact, in June, Iomega added an SMB version of Postini’s e-mail and IM security services to its own OfficeScreen services.

Imation is another vendor extending its portfolio beyond hardware with DataGuard Vault, an online backup service that many SMBs could find more palatable than the DIY approach.

Will these new services alter the industry’s storage spending habits? Perhaps, but our research indicates that only 7 percent of storage budget allotments will be spent on services in the next 12 months, up a meager 1 percent from a year ago. That said, the actual increase could be significantly more than our respondents anticipate; after all, the need to ensure compliance while protecting data assets shows no signs of abating.

Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.