Sayonara Storage!

Sadly, its the end of the storage road for me as I head off to pastures new later this week. Fear not, though, Byte and Switch will now be in the capable hands of former Information Week news editor Paul Travis, who was recently appointed B&S site editor and will be bringing his own inimitable style to all things storage. (His email address is [email protected].)

The other good news is that storage technology in general seems to be holding its own, even amidst the ongoing turmoil of the financial markets. Today, for example, analyst firm Forrester reported that storage spending should pick up next year.

Forrester found that there has been little or no growth so far this year -- perhaps 1 percent, which is hardly surprising, although at least one analyst told Byte and Switch that this cloud has a silver lining.

Storage spending will begin to pick up next year, according to Andrew Bartels, a principal analyst at Forrester, although he didn't have specific projections for the storage market. "You reach a point when you need to buy," he said. "CIOs like to have storage capacity that is around 150 percent of current needs. When the economy is bad they might take that down to 120 percent. But there is no let up in the flood of information that needs to be stored and when the margin gets thin they will start buying again. We think that will happen next year."

With Wall Street in a panic, maybe we should be grateful for the role played by storage in the modern enterprise. The technology may not be particularly sexy, but it will be a top priority for users as long as their mountains of data continue to grow.As I mentioned in a recent column, storageland is a good place to be at the moment. Just look at the results of a recent Byte and Switch poll. A near majority of respondents (48 percent) said that they were continuing to ramp up storage spending, and 19 percent said that their storage budget is unchanged.

For all the tech sector’s current problems, we should be grateful that storage continues to glimmer amidst the gloom.

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