By Tony Lock, IT-Analysis
Published Friday 18th February 2005
On the whole, surveys do not often provide "scientific data" but sometimes they can throw up some interesting observations on differing trends and how ready the world is to follow up on new developments. With this in mind, it is worthwhile taking a look at the results of a small survey performed by Nemertes Research at the Network World 2005 IT Roadmap Tech Tour conference, where attendees were quizzed on the state of their storage, virtualisation and open source deployments.

The survey was, by Nemertes' own admission, by no means statistically balanced, but the results it threw up are fascinating. When it comes to network storage, almost half of those surveyed (some 48 per cent) stated that their organisations have full production deployments of storage area networks (SAN) and / or networked attached storage (NAS). These figures are not wholly out of line with others generated over the last year or two, but it should be recognised that the organisations in this survey averaged some 18 Terabytes of storage each, while the median figure was found to be five Terabytes. This gives some indication that the survey respondents represented fairly large organisations.