ENGINEERING

SANTA BARBARA, CA -- An exclusive survey of over 400 storage IT managers was conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. and Hattras, Inc. revealing that two out of three data centers with over one terabyte of disk storage capacity currently deploy a SAN, and this ratio will grow to three out of four by the end of 2003. Companies with at least one NAS deployed today will grow from 38% to 60% during the same time period. A significant percentage of the companies surveyed own more than one SAN and remain cautious in their consolidation plans. The slow economy has not significantly impacted the user's appetite for data and storage. Companies operating on reduced budgets have attempted to better utilize their current disk capacity. However, the improved disk management has had little ongoing impact on the need and requirement to add SAN and NAS. In the past 18 months, disk capacity has continued to grow but at a slower pace than previous months. Increased Disk capacity has resulted in greater externalization of disk space. Storage networking is at a crossroad, with the two architectural models battling for supremacy. Performance emerges as number one on the list of the most desired features. Who buys SAN's and why? What do IT managers like and dislike? Why did some IT managers decide not to purchase NAS? These are just some of the questions that are addressed. Also, learn what keeps IT managers awake at night and for which solutions or services are companies willing to pay extra. Product innovations and new interconnects, protocols and infrastructures attempt to either overcome the limitations of the present architectures or create new architectural models. IT managers are watching these moves with extreme caution. Literally hundreds of new hardware and software companies are competing for a share of the enterprise data market. How much of a threat are these new companies to established vendors? How do their solutions match the users' concerns? Are users perplexed by the abundance of choices? At a time where budgets are tight, and businesses are striving to improve their bottom line, storage software vendors also face changes to their standard licensing models. Learn how Microsoft is influencing changes in the way that licensing is structured and how this has led to significant controversy among end users. A cross section of 100 end users were interviewed from the telecommunications, financial, government, energy, and healthcare sectors to determine the specific needs of customers purchasing storage software. Our findings show that software enterprise licensing, subscription licensing, service, pricing and discounts, as well as understanding the overall purchasing process, were top priorities for customers. Over 300 questions were asked. The results are analyzed in a report titled "Storage Networking- A Market Analysis". This extensive survey sheds new light on IT operations - demographics for servers, hardware and software storage vendors, switch and hub products, as well as storage services, segmented by operation size. For further information visit www.Hattras.com.