Storage Shines Amidst the Gloom

All the talk of economic doom and gloom has done little to dampen the enthusiasm of the storage zealots on the Byte and Switch message boards, who urged us to consider the recent financials of vendors such as Isilon and 3PAR.

Sure, some vendors, namely Quantum and Sun, are not having the easiest time of it at the moment. But there are plenty of signs that, overall, storage is performing admirably in a tough spending climate.

NetApp and Brocade, for example, are expected to give the sector a boost with strong results tomorrow, following in the footsteps of storage bellwethers EMC, HP, and IBM.

"Storage demand [is] healthy," wrote Pacific Growth Equities analyst Kaushik Roy, in a note last week. "We feel Brocades fundamentals are strong at this time. EMC, QLogic, IBM, LSI [and] HDS all reported strong results and we expect NetApp to beat revenue and EPS for July quarter."

These bullish sentiments were echoed by Citigroup analyst Paul Mansky.“The high end of the storage market was stronger than normal through the July quarter in large part due to the mainframe cycle, as confirmed by commentary from Sun, EMC, IBM and HP,” he explained in a note released yesterday.

Perhaps the economic doom-mongers are indeed wrong, at least as far as storage is concerned.

For one thing, users are clearly still spending money on storage to cope with the ongoing data explosion.

In the the most recent Byte and Switch spending poll, almost a third of respondents said that they are not changing their budget, and a quarter said that they were actually increasing their IT spend. Tellingly, only 8 percent said that they were slowing down all their near-term IT spending.

As for storage, the overwhelming majority (38 percent) said that they were continuing to ramp up storage spending, and 19 percent said that their storage budget is unchanged.Eight months on, storage vendors are clearly reaping the benefits of these spending strategies, underlining the importance of storage in users’ long-term technology plans.

What do you think? Why not tell us your thoughts on the latest Byte and Switch poll, which revisits the hot topic of storage spending.

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