About this time of year, the only storage most of us are thinking about is extra space to accommodate holiday gifts. In the IT world, however, network storage and business continuity are gaining importance—and interest—among Communications News subscribers. In fact, the interest among our audience in storage technologies is at its highest since at least 2001.

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Our just completed survey on this topic indicates that 2008 budgets for storage-related products and services are being increased by 32 percent of those polled, with 48 percent planning to spend the same as this year. Fifteen percent plan to spend at least $250,000 on storage solutions next year, with another 30 percent budgeting $50,000 to $250,000.

Most of those participating in the poll say they plan to purchase network-attached storage (49 percent), while 42 percent are interested in disk arrays, 38 percent in storage area network technology, 35 percent in e-mail archiving and 30 percent in iSCSI solutions. Content-addressed storage (4 percent) and Infiniband (1 percent) are not priorities for 2008.

We asked subscribers which companies they consider the leaders in storage solutions, and the top three are predictable: EMC (47 percent), IBM (46 percent) and Cisco Systems (37 percent). When asked which vendors they would purchase products from, however, readers opted for a lower-cost alternative—Dell (35 percent).

When asked the reasons for selecting a specific brand, half of respondents cited "price." Reliability was the top reason for such purchases, mentioned by 74 percent of respondents, with ease of integration second at 59 percent. Having the newest technology was important to just 5 percent of buyers.

While important in which products to buy, cost, however, is not the top concern driving the purchase of storage products and services among survey respondents. Data security is their main concern (56 percent), followed by interoperability (35 percent), data management (34 percent), cost (30 percent) and vendor reliability (28 percent).

Perhaps the most telling question we asked was, "Which companies (up to three) do you feel do the best job of informing you about their storage technology products or services?" Excuse me for crossing the ad/edit-church/state line here, but the companies who seem to be advertising the heaviest received the highest scores (IBM, 47 percent; EMC, 41 percent; and Cisco Systems, 37 percent). Dell was right behind at 36 percent, but the numbers indicate a general lack of knowledge about what solutions are available and how those solutions fit into particular IT needs.

Meanwhile, vendors that maintain a relatively low profile in their storage marketing efforts in the enterprise IT space scored low in the study. These include: Sun Storagetek, 13 percent; Network Appliance, 13 percent; Quantum, 12 percent; Hitachi, 11 percent; and Sony, 6 percent.

So store some calories from your holiday sit-downs, and have a great holiday season–from all of us at Communications News and Nelson Publishing.

kanderberg@comnews.com