According to a recent report from Dublin-based Research and Markets, improving efficiency is the No. 1 objective of IT spending plans. The idea of spending money to save money may seem a little odd but, if you think about it, any technology purchase should improve operational efficiency to some degree.

With spiraling storage growth, storage managers are more apt to spend their budgets to deploy technologies that do more to stem the tide than create a more efficient storage environment. It's a matter of survival rather than fine-tuning. And you can't blame them for being more tactical than strategic, as so many of the technologies they need to implement are point products.

Data protection is a good example. The parade of point solutions--continuous data protection (CDP), virtual tape libraries (VTLs), single-instance storage--goes on and on. They're all good technologies that address specific needs and can fix something that's broken in a shop's storage environment. But the issue isn't whether the products work or not, it's that adding one or more of them means still more tools in the storage arsenal to learn, administer, maintain and pay for.