Midmarket Storage Update: 2007

North American medium-size businesses expect to grow their storage budgets by 10% in 2008, driven primarily by increasing needs for data protection and raw volume. Medium-size businesses prefer to purchase storage from a single vendor and are most likely to purchase that storage from their server vendor. To capitalize on this pairing preference, systems vendors should create server/storage bundles that can be pushed through their reseller channels. All storage vendors can differentiate their otherwise commoditized offerings by including comprehensive storage management software. Since medium-size businesses are IT-staff-constrained, storage management software should hide the technical complexities and focus on ease of use to boost IT operational efficiency.