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“At some point, once you’ve thinly provisioned everything and deduplicated everything, you can’t continue to store more data on the capacity you have. At some point, storage growth will pick up.”

Marco Coulter, managing director of TheInfoPro’s storage and cloud sector research, commenting on his firm’s latest survey of 278 IT managers. Coulter said that deduplication technology, which shrinks file sizes by removing duplicate data before it’s stored on disk storage systems, is still mostly unused by large organizations. (Computerworld)

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The recent bidding war between Dell and HP to acquire storage-vendor 3PAR has brought the storage sector into the limelight. In the middle of this action, the IT research and advisory firm TheInfoPro has released its latest storage study, which looks at drivers and trends across the server sector. Highlights of this study, as reported by Computer World (“More IT managers plan to spend less, survey finds”) include a flat storage market for 2010 and possibly 2011 in terms of spending by IT managers, as well as ongoing focus on virtualization and cloud computing. In addition, EMC remains a top choice for storage-area network (SAN) equipment, as does NetApp in the area of network-attached storage (NAS).

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A survey of 278 IT managers found that spending on storage systems is expected to remain flat through next year because of the soft economy and new technologies that allow IT administrators to do more with what they already have.

The survey, conducted by research firm TheInfoPro in June, also asked IT managers which vendors they were most likely to stop doing business with. Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2009, took the top spots.

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Storage spending among Fortune 1000 customers reports modest growth with 35% of organisations expecting to further appropriations in 2011, while only 13% of midsize enterprises (MSEs) face storage budgets cuts in 2011, according to a study by a research and advisory company for the IT industry, TheInfoPro.

TheInfoPro said that 39% of Fortune 1000 customers anticipate stable storage spending, while in MSEs only 13% face storage budgets cuts in 2011, compared to 27% in 2010, and 26% of Fortune 1000 customers are facing budget cuts, a decrease of 4% percent compared to this year.

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On the vendor side, the narrative continues to surround EMC’s rise and the underwhelming performance of IBM and Oracle: TheInfoPro report found EMC has many customers planning to spend more than $25 million with the company this year.

Independent IT research firm TheInfoPro released its latest storage study, which yielded some encouraging news for the industry and indicates which companies stand to emerge strongest from the recession. According to the study, total storage spending among Fortune 1000 customers reports modest growth with 35 percent of organizations expecting to boost appropriations in 2011 and 39 percent anticipating stable spending.

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WE TOLD YOU, THE WHALES CAN GET HUNGRY.

As Barron’spredicted last year in an Oct. 26 cover story, a wave of technology acquisitions is in full swing these days. The most recent action is the fierce bidding by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) for 3Par (PAR), a skirmish that we also also foreshadowed in a feature about 3Par (“3Par: Doing More With Less,” Dec. 28, 2009).

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Forget looking for a Mr. Right that’s a mirror image of you. The latest smart dating strategy for finding love, says New York psychotherapist Patricia M. DeVost, is going out with a brother from another… perspective. Here, DeVost, a contributor to the new dating website OppositesConnect.com explains why embracing the yin and yang of love may be your next relationship breakthrough.

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Corporate tech consumers are embracing cloud computing more enthusiastically than expected, which is partially what’s driving the strong demand for advanced storage products, such as those sold by takeover target 3Par.

We have been extolling the virtues of storage since the recession started, including the probability that 3Par (ticker: PAR) and other storage outfits would become coveted targets. (See related story in Follow-Up).

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Were the events of the last week an eBay auction, then the bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say that the former company sniped the auction at the last minute—to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR.

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Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and other systems makers are benefiting from the resurgence in the x86 server market, according to market research by Gartner and IDC.

In their second-quarter reports on the server market, analysts from both Gartner and IDC said the x86 space continues to see significant growth as enterprises refresh server fleets that they had held onto longer than normal due to budget crunches during the global recession