Is storage more recession-proof than other technologies? It appears to be.

IT has a growing amount of data that needs to be stored. It doesn’t look like that is going to abate. With regulatory compliance and retention guidelines (Compare Network Auditing and Compliance products) such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, data storage is expected to do nothing but grow (Compare Storage products).

IT is challenged by this rampant growth of storage, and CIOs and storage managers have no other way to deal with this growth of storage than by purchasing more storage or learning how to manage it more efficiently.

Server consolidation through VMware is also adding to the proliferation of storage. Because about 75% of the virtualized servers used networked storage for storing their data and server images, storage growth is accelerating.

Witness:

- Gartner shows a 6.6% growth in external controller-based (ECB) disk storage in 2007.

- Intel plans according to CEO Paul Otellini to boost its revenue by introducing solid state disk (SSD) products for enterprise storage and notebooks this quarter. The SSDs will have capacities of 80GB to 160GB.

- Data Domain, a data de-duplication vendor, reported that the company’s sales had increased 160% in the first quarter of this year.

- Attendees at Storage Networking World didn’t expect the economic recession to affect their storage purchases. They cite technologies such as virtualization, de-duplication and e-mail archiving as saving them money.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.