At the beginning of 2011, I wrote in this space about CIOs and the transformative nature of today’s IT departments, and discussed how innovation is a way to manage the complexity of rapid change.

I’ve since realized that IT and the role of CIOs and Senior IT managers are indeed transforming, but in ways that are faster and less predictable than we could see only a few months ago.

The word on everyone’s lips these days is “consumerization.” There multiple ways to look at this issue. One is faster technology purchase cycles. For instance, whereas cycles used to be longer and more predictable, now, due to more readily available information on products, demand for more modern infrastructure design, and need for nimbler project management, typical cycles for enterprise buyers are being reduced to resemble those of consumers: two to five months, with fewer vendors considered.

Another other idea is that consumerization is about how consumer products, especially mobile devices, have become central to productivity and as a result are changing the way IT manages such products.

A third example is that IT is beginning to treat its “users” as “consumers” giving those users a more consumer-like experience in the workspace, allowing things like “app stores” and other self-service experiences facilitated by cloud computing and social media.

At the heart of the trend is enabling technology to service users better, and by extension the business. A new generation of users is demanding more from technology and pushing for ways that IT departments can facilitate their productivity through technology.

Corporate IT environments are being squeezed from the top by executives who want the last and greatest in enterprise mobility and by an evolving workforce that is more mobile, more technology savvy, and is less inclined to draw a line between corporate and personal technology.

So IT departments, which traditionally have issued and controlled technology to employees to let them do their jobs, are now grappling with how to manage and secure technology that they may have not procured or provisioned (i.e., bring your own device) and that could put the enterprise at risk.

This is a major challenge for today’s and tomorrow’s CIOs. As IT departments transform themselves into a service provider business-within-the-business, CIOs in turn are changing their roles from technology guardians, to technology enablers.

There’s no doubt that the Agile software development methodology has made a tremendous impact on software development, introducing incremental development practices that promise to bring applications to market faster with higher quality and fostering organizational changes, such as improved collaboration between business and development groups.

Yet, 2011 may be the year that Agile users have taken off their rose-colored glasses and stirred up an Agile backlash. Looking at the pains experienced in first Agile projects, they are re-evaluating their approaches and frequently mixing Agile and other development methodologies. We’ll look at the trends behind this mash-up of Agile hybridization and retrenching in this post.

In 2011, the number of Agile users decreased for the first time in four years in July’s SearchSoftwareQuality.com (SSQ) 2011 Agile ALM and Testing Survey of over 450 software professionals. Last year’s four-year Agile usage high of 57% dropped to 34% this year in the 2011 survey, while usage of waterfall development remained at about 50% year over year.

Out of context, these figures seem to put Agile in decline; but a broader view shows that Agile is interwoven into other methodologies and usage of Agile practices is growing.

All told, the majority of software organizations are using Agile practices, but not pure Agile. About 28% of SSQ survey respondents use a hybrid development methodology. Hybrid development typically refers to a mix of Agile and other development methodologies. Also, 11 percent of respondents use the Agile Unified Process (AUP), an Agile version of the Rational Unified Process (RUP). Add to this the 12% who use Lean software development, which includes many Agile processes.

More evidence that Agile has infiltrated most types of development comes from a recent Analysis.Net Research survey, sponsored by VersionOne, of 4,770 participants from 91 countries. Only 27% of respondents use one type of Agile only, while 35% mix Agile with other methodologies and 39% mix Agile flavors, like Scrum and AUP. A whopping 90% of respondents use Agile in some way.

Why aren’t the majority of Agile adopters using pure Agile? The short answer is that organizations have encountered organizational and functional problems in Agile projects and cherry-picked other methodologies’ practices to solve them.

Organizational problems have happened when organizations quickly adopted Agile development without having experienced Agile leaders on board or adequately training team members. Some found Agile’s requirement for frequent meetings untenable or impractical because team members were widely distributed or resistant to the Agile team approach. The Agile/Scrum practice of short iterations and modular development and business-development collaboration also put a strain on teams that had worked with longer deadlines and in relative isolation.

The SSQ 2010 and 2011 survey shows little change in these organizational challenges in Agile development. Resistance to change was a problem for 37% in 2010 and 2011; communication 47% in 2010 and 52% this year. Lack of training, management support and unrealistic expectations are chronic problems for about a third of Agile users.

Challenges in functional areas of Agile development remain, too. Software documentation has been difficult for years for over half of SSQ survey respondents. Others have ongoing problems with tool integration, (http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tutorial/Scaling-Agile-Beating-challenges-in-large-scale-Agile-development) scaling Agile to large projects and organizations, automating testing and managing requirements.

While the above practical and organizational challenges can be common in all types of development, using Agile methods can exacerbate them. Documentation, in particular, is problematic in Agile because there’s little time to document when iterations are only weeks long. Also, some mistake Agile’s call for just enough documentation as license to do little or no documentation. Generally, inadequate documentation puts test and quality assurance teams at a disadvantage. Short iterations also spur management’s unrealistic expectations for feature delivery.

Once Agile became mainstream, with literally millions of software pros using it, it’s only natural that a period of adjustment has occurred. Modifications will continue to occur, due to a greater understanding and continuing advancement of Agile. Organizations will be mixing legacy and Agile methods, as well as utilizing new automated management and functional tools to streamline documentation, lifecycle management and more. They’re also adopting Agile-friendly practices, such as Test Driven Development, which dictates that the code and documentation are combined and are more accurate than documentation done the traditional way.

Agile’s basic principles – incremental and lightweight development, self-organizing teams, cross-functional communication and collaboration – are widely accepted and not being debated today. While some Agile purists may protest hybridization of the methodology, other Agile proponents think modification and change is an extension of the Agile way.

There’s an ironic dark side to server virtualization. Virtual machines (VMs) are so quick and easy to create that they can easily proliferate in servers across the data center, resulting in VM sprawl. When left unmanaged, these stray VMs can sap precious computing resources and undo the benefits that virtualization is supposed to provide in the first place, such as fewer machines, less power, less cooling and less space in the data center. The waste is simply moved from “unused server resources” to “too many unnecessary workloads.”

Just consider some findings from our State of the Data Center: 2011 report. Between 2010 and 2011, the total number of physical servers in the enterprise remained steady, yet more organizations are deploying virtualization, and servers are handling more (sometimes many more) workloads. These observations run counter to the original premise of server virtualization, where the net amount of physical servers should be reduced, and it may mean that VM sprawl is a much bigger problem than we realize (or want to believe).

Simplicity and automation can be problematic

Preventing VM sprawl is easy in principle–know the workloads, justify each VM before it is created, allocate only enough resources for them to operate properly, track their lifecycle and remove them at the end of their lifecycle so that computing resources are returned to a common pool for reuse.

In actual practice, however, the problem of VM sprawl is a bit more complicated than that. In another ironic twist, a big part of the sprawl problem is simplicity. Where a traditional server deployment takes weeks or months for completion and needs a formal capital requisition and justification, a VM can be created in just a few minutes with three to four mouse clicks.

In addition, virtualization plays directly into automation and self-service–two goals that desperately overworked and understaffed IT departments have been seeking for years. A typical organization may allow many different individuals to create VMs, taking some burden off IT administrators. But admins need to pay attention. Otherwise, the only sign of trouble will be warnings from performance monitoring tools, or applications will just slow down and start crashing. Then, it’s a full-scale fire drill to find and remedy the problem. However, after the problem is found, excess VMs are rarely (if ever) removed, because the VM’s owner “might” still need it later.

To add insult to injury, all of those excess VMs need licenses for operating systems and applications, dramatically raising the cost of VM sprawl well beyond the simple price of hardware, and potentially exposing an organization to the costly penalties of licensing violations.

Admitting a problem is the first step to a cure

The first step in curing VM sprawl is admitting that there’s a problem in the first place. It requires IT administrators to step back and honestly evaluate the workloads running in their environment. Even a tightly controlled data center will have a small percentage of VM sprawl, and the problem can be frightening in organizations that don’t institute any policies and controls. Once you have a clear picture of the current situation, it’s easier to figure out ways to recover resources and prevent future problems.

Making the VM creation process harder is never a good solution. Administrators want the automation and self-service potential that virtualization offers, and putting VM creation in the hands of one or two staff members simply creates a process bottleneck.

A better approach is to use a monitoring tool that can find workloads and report on their performance, create and adhere to business policies that define the workload’s lifecycle, and employ chargeback tools so that VM owners pay for the computing resources that each workload uses. It’s true that none of these actions are guaranteed to prevent 100% of VM sprawl, but taken together, they can help organizations get a handle on the problem and curtail the growth of a phenomenon that threatens today’s virtualized data centers.

The suddenly very lively cloud storage market is making strides toward overcoming the three key hurdles to user acceptance:

• The Been-There-Done-That Syndrome – The concept of cloud storage is hardly new—it showed up about 15 years and flamed out pretty quickly as service providers grappled with cost structures and enterprise users stayed away in droves. Today a lot of storage pros want to know what’s different now, and why they should take a chance this time around.

• What the Heck is an Internal Cloud? – If it wasn’t already hard enough for cloud storage providers to convince companies to park their precious data somewhere “in the cloud,” the whole picture was muddled further by the concept of internal storage clouds. Most people thought “cloud” meant Internet or at least somewhere far, far away, but an internal cloud could be in your own data center using familiar storage gear. That idea stretched the definition of “cloud” beyond many IT shops’ understanding.

• Cloud This, Cloud That – Also contributing to cloud storage 2.0’s less than auspicious “rebirth” were over-enthusiastic vendors over-hyping products that had dubious—if any—ties to cloud technologies. All of a sudden just about every traditional array on the market miraculously turned into a cloud storage system and run-of-the-mill storage management software became “cloud-enabled.” Users either saw through the marketing contortions or were too confused to do anything.

So, what’s changed? Mostly, we’ve all gotten a little older and a little wiser, and a lot more skeptical. And while these three hurdles haven’t been completely cleared, for the most part we’ve gotten past the initial chaos and things are beginning to fall into place.

Users are doing a better job of holding vendors’ feet to the fire when they claim “cloudiness” for a product or service, so the messaging issues are beginning to subside a bit lending a little more clarity to the cloud these days.

The big, well-established cloud storage providers like Amazon, AT&T and Rackspace have brought some much-needed stability to a technology category that gains and loses players almost daily. Those vendors demonstrate that cloud storage can be a good fit for certain applications and that it’s not strictly an SMB play.

The internal cloud dilemma might be the toughest nut to crack both from a user understanding perspective and how vendors sharpen their pitches for this implementation alternative. But here, too, we’ve seen some progress, owing largely to an unexpected source: the emerging market for hybrid cloud storage products and services. The “hybrid idea” seems to have struck a chord with storage managers who are more apt to consider using cloud storage if it integrates neatly with their existing infrastructure.

We’re beginning to see some tangible evidence of this evolution in cloud storage perception. Our Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com survey research shows that the numbers are there—or almost there—to add some statistical relevance to the lofty predictions and claims about cloud storage adoption.

In our most recent Storage Purchasing Intentions survey, fielded last March, we found that cloud storage is moving beyond its traditional SMB/remote office/mobile worker backup base and companies are tapping cloud storage resources for other applications. Overall 16% of responding companies said they’re currently using cloud storage services for non-backup purposes, with disaster recovery and data center data storage the leading applications. Among the respondents who aren’t currently using cloud storage, 46% either have plans to start doing so or to consider/evaluate the services. And current users appear to be pretty pleased—more than three-quarters plan to add new cloud storage services this year.

These numbers certainly aren’t staggering as they still represent a relatively small slice of enterprise storage users, but they have grown over a short period of time and they’re bolstered by the more positive—and better informed—buzz that you hear from storage managers now. It seems that marketing jargon and hype aside, vendors of cloud storage services have to do what they’d do for any IT product—find its most advantageous niche and demonstrate its subsequent cost effectiveness. The hybrid approach which complements current infrastructures and offer clear cost savings may emerge as cloud storage’s killer app.

Most of you should know how many personal mobile devices are being used for work in your organization, but likely the number you are guessing is low.

If you are not sure, read our report on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). In an informal survey of 81 U.S. CIOs who attended a recent workshop on managing mobility, at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in Scottsdale, AZ:

“When asked about what percentage of their workforce they expect by 2013 to own the mobile devices they use at work, CIOs’ responses averaged 38%. Another one-third of the CIOs, however, pegged their BYOD population at less than 20%, and almost 20% of the CIOs expect 80% or more of their employees to own the devices they use at work.”

In addition, according to Gartner, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices within three years.

What used to be a relatively easy process of procuring mobile and wireless contracts and provisioning devices to users has become a complex guessing game involving everything from corporate email to VPN accounts to privileged data being exchanged over non-corporate assets.

One area really pushing the envelope here is the health care industry, whose physicians are buying their own iPads and logging into electronic health care applications through free virtual clients before IT departments can figure out what their wireless strategy should be.

The truth is we have reached a time of unprecedented power of the user in IT management, and it’s up to IT managers to accommodate them. But the risks are too great to abdicate responsibilities, so CIOs and senior IT managers must get ahead of the issues, as SearchCIO.com contributor Niel Nickolaisen notes.

“People and groups react to change in one of three ways: They deny it, they resist it or they embrace it,” he writes. “I have pondered these three reactions, and would like to add one more possibility to the list: Deal with change by leading it.”

He recommends that IT professionals deal with the mobile “megatrend” the same way we all eventually came to understand and manage the Internet revolution. Figure out the potential of the technology and go there, rather than waiting for the technology to evolve out of control, and keep an open mind to what others are doing and succeeding at.

Sounds like good advice no matter what the problem is.

It’s 2011, but storage managers are still beleaguered by some of the same problems that plagued them in 2010, 2009, 2008… They have more and more data that they need to accommodate and then protect, and they’ll likely have to do that with fewer resources than in previous years.

On our annual SearchStorage.com priorities survey, storage managers indicated that they expect to add an average of 57 TB of disk capacity this year-that’s up nearly 27% from just a year ago and 46% from two years ago. Budgets, of course, aren’t growing at nearly the same pace, with an average increase of 3.1% reported this year.

Limited funds or not, they’ll have to do some shopping this year for new storage systems for all that new data. Threatened by the emergence of SAS-2 disks and an accelerating 10 Gig Ethernet implementation rate, Fibre Channel storage nonetheless remains a strong-an often favored-contender among storage systems. Nearly half the survey respondents said they would buy Fibre Channel storage in 2011, down from 60%+ from last year, but still well ahead of its rival block-storage, iSCSI, which is on about 27% of storage managers shopping lists.

Perhaps the biggest news in the storage systems world, however, is the emergence of multiprotocol arrays. A couple of years ago only about a third of respondents said they intended to buy a multiprotocol system, but today 40% see it as a best of both worlds solution, providing both block and file storage in a single box. Virtually every storage vendor now has at least one multiprotocol array in its portfolio, with the NAS/iSCSI combo emerging as a strong favorite.

Using disk space efficiently is also a priority. Space technologies are taking off: last year less than 20% said they were using thin provisioning-this year twice that many are; and the use of primary storage data reduction technologies has grown from about 17% last year to more than 28% this time around.

Storage virtualization also offers efficiencies in capacity provisioning and utilization, but users have often been deterred by its perceived complexity and high cost. That, however, is changing-and changing rather dramatically, in fact. Twenty-nine percent say they’re virtualizing some of their block storage compared to 16% last year and only 11% a few years back. On the file side, 22% report that they’re using file virtualization, up from last year’s 15%.

While storage managers are making major moves toward using storage more efficiently, they’re not forsaking performance. Solid-state storage continues its surprising rise, with 36% indicating that they’ll purchase the high-speed, cool-running storage in 2011. The cost of solid state is still a factor which has forced vendors and users to find novel ways to implement it to get the biggest bang for the buck out of the flash storage. As such, we’re seeing more solid state implementations that are accompanied by dynamic tiering software that can swap hot data in and out of the solid state devices as needed. It’s a cost-effective way to improve storage performance significantly.

The economic crisis of 2008-2009 may have forced storage shops into finding new economies of their own, but it has also had a profound and lasting effect on basic storage operations: companies want to know that their money is well spent and that they get the most and best use out of the gear they buy.

“CIOs are simply lost. Technology is evolving so quickly that some decisions made today could have far-reaching consequences, and CIOs are not sure how to cost-justify decisions and build business cases that resemble a strategic plan.”

That’s a strong statement. It comes from Steve Woods, Modernization Strategist, Distinguished Software Engineering, for Hewlett-Packard Applications Services. He recently demonstrated a new boot camp-like program HP is giving senior IT executives who are looking for ways to transform or at least modernize their IT infrastructure.

I’m not sure if HP is alone in this type of intense, interactive venture, but they have struck on something significant, and that is confronting the issue of complexity that always seems to delay, detour or dump an IT project completely.

Surprisingly, however, much of the HP program does not even deal with technology, but with people. How do you get people and the culture aligned with the process of innovation and change?

This question is one reason why SearchCIO.com has started to talk more directly to CIOs about IT innovation, with the CIO Innovators Profiles in IT and Business Leadership. We ask, what role did innovation play in the execution of a successful IT project? Was the original idea born out of innovative thinking, or did innovative methods enable the project to get off the ground, or clear significant hurdles along the way? More to the point, how do you create a culture in which innovation is part of everything you do?

Steven John, CIO of H.B. Fuller, explained that an innovation is a function of time. People need time to develop ideas, and you have to have enough foresight into the goals of an organization that you can start planning how to get there early. In order to free up time John said you have to make sure that no one is wasting their time or others’ in day-to-day activities, or that no one is duplicating tasks. “If you are doing something that someone else can do, then things that only you can do are not getting done,” he said.

Another key aspect to a transformative process is motivation. Like many entrenched corporate personnel, IT staff need to be motivated that a major upheaval is worth their considerable time and effort. One means to that end is a tool that HP uses to analyze legacy code and report back to IT managers how much efficiency (i.e., money) can be gained by replacing or removing redundant or unnecessary sections of code.

As it turns out, John’s statement can be applied to software as well as people. In both cases, neither is getting the most out of what they can offer to the business if they are not maximizing their potential. When that happens on both sides, the path toward innovation can open up, which can lead to the IT-business alignment that always seems so elusive.

With 2010 almost behind us, thoughts are turning to what 2011 will have in store. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 became available to the general public in late 2009. Now, a full year later - and with the first service pack available - many organizations may finally be ready to migrate to Exchange Server 2010.

According to TechTarget’s 2010 “Windows Purchasing Intentions Survey,” only 17% of respondents currently working in Exchange environments have deployed Exchange Server 2010, and 40% are still on Exchange Server 2003. But 50% of those who aren’t already on Exchange 2010 said they’d be migrating sometime in the next year.

Maintaining Exchange Server 2003 deployments has grown both troublesome and costly. Many users are considering a move to Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3, but the more practical move may be to Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

One of the most notable features of Exchange 2010 SP1 is the personal archive mailbox. In an effort to address the need for long-term storage, the personal archive was placed in the same database as users’ personal mailboxes in the original release. But considering how quickly the additional mailbox might bloat the database, Microsoft now gives Exchange administrators the option to move the personal archive to a separate database in SP1.

Migrating to Exchange Server 2010 can also save companies money on storage. According to early adopters, Microsoft has improved storage in Exchange 2010 to the point where those moving from Exchange 2007 can reduce disk I/O by as much as 70%. Similarly, those moving from Exchange 2003 can reduce I/O by as much as 90%. By reducing disk I/O so significantly, companies can turn to SATA disks and direct-attached storage, which are much more economical.

Exchange 2010 includes several other new features and improvements designed to help both users and administrators. Database availability groups improve high availability and disaster recovery. Role based access control allows you to delegate permission levels to both administrators and users.  And it’s the first version of Exchange that allows for hosted as well as on-premise deployments. Exchange 2010 is also flexible enough that you can host some servers in the cloud and leave some on premise.

After a year of talk and waiting, 2011 should finally see significant action around Exchange 2010 migrations.

Ah, fall. It’s my favorite time of year. The crisp air, ripe apples and leaves crunching underfoot are so invigorating I can even overlook the impending winter for a while. The downside of fall for me, and for many of us, is the endless exercises in Excel that our executive teams benignly refer to as “the budget process.” And the pain of budgeting has compounded as we’ve struggled through the ongoing recession. Those of us lucky enough to be in the networking field, however, have a decidedly more optimistic outlook for this budget planning season than last. TechTarget’s recent Networking Priorities research showed that our readers share a cautious optimism and are embracing new technologies at a surprisingly quick rate.

More than half of the 1600 networking professionals who responded to our survey - 56% - reported that they will be increasing their network investments in the coming year, up 15 full percentage points from those who anticipated increases in 2009. Readers cite worker productivity, disaster recovery, supporting virtualization and network security, in that order, as the most important factors driving their spending on network investments.

So perhaps a feeling of optimism is not so surprising when you stop and think about it, despite the uncertainty of the world economy and business in general. Networking is an enabler, a must-have. Just about every IT function today, even those that are viewed as cost-cutting measures (think server consolidation and Everything as a Service) depends on a highly functioning network to run smoothly. What might seem like a simple implementation of video conferencing to reduce travel costs may require upgrades in network equipment, bandwidth and management software. Or a reduction in data center footprints might mean adding WAN optimization and a new network disaster recovery plan to ensure timely backups.

In most enterprises, all of this translates to networking professionals broadening their skill sets or specializing in new areas. As always, network engineers and administrators are working with technologies closely associated with their major field, such as data protection and mobility/wireless networks (see chart). But increasingly, networking pros are branching into areas that were formerly domains of the server group, the storage group, and even facilities management.

Storage is an area the networking team never touched in the past, but is being drawn into as Ethernet encroaches on storage area networks. Almost seventy percent of our survey respondents said they are involved in purchasing storage networking gear, and 25% report that storage networking is taking up more networking resources and staff than in the past. More than one third said they are planning to converge their storage and data networks in the next 24 months.

Virtualization is inescapable in IT today, and the network is certainly feeling its impact. Networking professionals are increasingly being called on to help with server virtualization projects. Of our network survey takers, about 60% said they are involved in purchasing and managing server virtualization technology. More than 40% reported that server virtualization is requiring more network resources than it did in the past; it was the number one related activity eating up the networking team’s time.

Networking pros are also thinking outside of the box and assuming responsibility when it comes to technologies that take advantage of the IP infrastructure to improve a traditional manual function. Many companies are wiring their video surveillance and security systems into their data networks, and 55% of our readers anticipated spending more in the coming year on this technology. IP energy monitoring and management is another burgeoning industry that a healthy 42% of respondents expected to invest in as their users look to conserve power and link into the smart grid.

Willingness to learn and buy new things doesn’t mean that networking folks are not cost conscious; the contrary seems to be true. In our survey, about half of all respondents reported that they were either investigating less expensive network hardware options from different vendors than currently in use, exploring cheaper products from their current vendors, looking at low-cost “commodity” hardware vendors, or lengthening their buying cycles to save money. Readers overwhelmingly chose price as the reason they might change equipment vendors.

Although the journey on the road to recovery continues to be slow going for many storage managers, there are some promising signs as it appears that they’ll have a few more bucks to spend through the end of the year. On our recently fielded Storage Purchasing Intentions survey, we found that storage budgets have risen an average of 0.6% compared to 2009’s budgets. Not exactly a big number or cause for celebration, but a definite improvement over the negative numbers tallied last year. And the dollar amount of the overall average budget also rose to fairly healthy $3.1 million (although 52% reported storage budgets under $1 million.)

But if storage managers are feeling some relief on the budget front, they’re not getting many breaks when it comes to adding new disk storage capacity. On average, storage shops will be adding 40 TB of new disk storage this year, about the same capacity they added the last couple of years. Of course, adding more capacity has a ripple effect throughout all storage operations - it’s that much more to manage, there’s more data to protect and the storage infrastructure becomes even more complex.

On the backup front, a lot of companies have been able to ease the pain of non-stop capacity growth by using newer technologies such as data deduplication, which can drastically reduce the capacity needed - and the time required - to back up production data. More complex infrastructures and the need to manage more storage typically without growing staff have been tougher nuts to crack, and storage managers have gotten few breaks when it comes to managing primary storage.

Thin provisioning was perhaps the first attempt to gain greater control on growing data stores; now offered by most storage system vendors, users are beginning to become proficient in its use as they learn the intricacies of over provisioning. But, despite its benefits, thin provisioning is most effective in forestalling new disk purchases and, in some cases, companies are using it to essentially kick the can down the road while more permanent solutions develop.

According to our survey, storage managers are focusing on two disparate areas to help find that more enduring solution: data reduction in primary storage (DRIPS) and cloud storage. What’s interesting is that the former is a straight disk-efficiency application which squeezes out redundant or unnecessary bits to free up disk space, while the latter is a more wholesale solution that involves shipping data to someone else’s data center.

Right now, there are still only a handful of vendors offering DRIPS apps or functionality, and with the recent consolidation in that market (Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina and IBM picking up Storwize), it’s still unclear just how quickly the market will develop - but if you sell storage systems, you should anticipate that your customers will soon expect a data reduction option. On our survey, primary storage data reduction was second to only backup deduplication as the hottest tech, with 68% of respondents saying they’ve implemented it or plan to, or are seriously evaluating the technology. Note, too, that it was only fourth on the hot tech list as recently as last spring - so interesting - and expectation is intensifying.

Cloud storage offers another way to deal with the capacity crunch without having to retool or replace storage systems. Over the past couple of years, the use of cloud storage services expressly for backup has grown steadily. In 2008, 14% of survey respondents said they were using cloud backup in some form; on our recent survey, that number has grown to 34% more than doubling in only two years.

As companies have expanded their use of cloud storage for backup, they’ve also become more receptive to considering cloud storage for other applications that aren’t limited to backup data. In fact, our survey shows that 23% of respondents are currently using a cloud storage service for non-backup purposes, including disaster recovery, data center primary and nearline data, and remote office primary data. On the spring edition of our survey, conducted in March 2010, about 14% said they were cloud storage users. And the prospects for further growth are solid with only 48% of respondents saying they wouldn’t consider a cloud storage service this year.

Storage, perhaps more than other IT segments, tends to lumber along, and significant architectural or technological changes occur at an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary pace. Against that backdrop, the gains - both in interest and implementations - that we’ve seen for both DRIPS and cloud storage really standout and demonstrate that storage managers are, indeed, beginning to think outside the box.