The latest European Storage Survey from IDC revealed a market shift towards tactical spending, though cuts are less likely for storage than other areas of IT.
2009 storage priorities revolve around expanded storage capacity, enhanced disaster recovery plans and improved storage performance. These priorities are ahead of management and optimization plans with consolidating storage onto fewer platforms, reducing back up windows, and cutting recovery times also being named.

Even further down the priority list are ensuring data retention compliance, reducing environmental impact and addressing power and cooling demands.

"Deteriorating economic environments are causing many storage managers to rethink how they spend their budgets. It is notable, consequently, that quick-fix solutions topped the list of choices our respondents provided when asked what changes were most likely to occur as a result of current economic conditions. Indeed, survey respondents were most likely to deal with economic downturns by freezing spending related to new projects, switching to lower-cost technology or increasing the approvals needed for spending decisions.

Of further interest was the fact that storage was far less likely to experience spending cuts during these difficult economic times than other technologies such as PCs, printers, servers, and networking equipment.

"Changing economic conditions and new technologies such as server and storage virtualization are clearly altering the way European storage managers design and deploy their storage infrastructure," said Eric Sheppard, program manager for IDC's EMEA storage research.

"Our survey suggests that the current economic conditions will result in a short-term shift towards tactical spending on storage, while rising adoption of server virtualization is driving new interest in advanced features provided by storage virtualization offerings."

When it came to likely spending cuts the survey asked: in which of the following hardware areas do you currently anticipate your company would make spending cuts in the event of an economic slowdown over the next 12 months? 11% said storage consulting services, 9% cited optical drives or libraries, the same number said storage management services and tape drives.

IDC said the survey pointed to a rapidly changing storage landscape.

The survey questioned 522 European storage decision makers in December 2008 and January 2009 in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Nordics.