SANpulse Technologies, Inc. today revealed new trends in IT attitudes towards storage spending and the top vertical markets that can benefit from storage migration and consolidation strategies that emerged at the company’s recent VIP Executive Briefing and Roundtable in Boston, Massachusetts.

The SANpulse-sponsored event allowed industry analysts, service providers and SANpulse executives to share experiences, challenges and market information regarding the current state and trends for improving enterprise storage infrastructures through more efficient migration and consolidation strategies.

Roundtable attendees also heard a presentation from Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, who detailed the findings from a recent ESG survey of trends for 2010 that found that the economic climate for IT managers has evolved to “cautious optimism” as corporate IT budgets progress from a directive of cost reduction to cost containment. According to the ESG survey, a majority of companies plan to increase storage spending this year with increased use of server virtualization and the management of data growth touted as the top IT drivers for 2010. Operational cost reduction replaced capital cost reduction as the top justification for spending, according to ESG, highlighting the challenge for IT of maintaining and managing a diverse enterprise storage infrastructure.

“The challenge to IT of controlling storage OPEX costs while trying to keep pace with data growth, security, compliance requirements and business process improvement brought about by server virtualization has created a perfect storm, calling for the automation of storage management tasks as much as possible, including migration and consolidation,” said Laliberte. “Automated management is a key strategic initiative for IT to meet its goals of minimizing operational costs by reducing infrastructure complexity and lowering risk associated with manual migration and consolidation processes.”

“IT needs to adopt new methodologies to maintain its SLA commitments while still dealing with strong data growth and budget mandates to do more with less,” said Laliberte. “Automating mundane, time-intensive processes as much as possible is critical to freeing up IT resources and personnel for more productive and revenue-generating initiatives that have a bottom line benefit for the business.”

SANpulse Chief Executive Officer Peter Mehta told the roundtable participants that the enterprise is the “Wild West” in terms of IT’s ability to control the space and effectively deliver technology solutions that solve business problems or provide new services. For example, even with the best storage technologies deployed, many enterprises are still reporting storage utilization rates of only around 20 percent of their available storage resources.

According to Mehta, “the major pain points that SANpulse’s enterprise customers are trying to solve include more visibility of their IT infrastructure, accelerated time-to-value for new systems and improved storage utilization. Lacking a comprehensive view of the IT infrastructure can lead to a situation where enterprise users purchase technology to address specific challenges, but do not necessarily solve the intended problem.”

“Strategic IT design is now front and center,” he said. “A global view of the total IT environment, including virtualized platforms, storage and more, can help with resolving IT ownership and responsibilities, allowing enterprises to maximize the value of what they already own rather than relying on new capital projects to improve IT efficiency.”

SANpulse’s flagship SANlogics platform addresses the IT concerns relayed by Mehta with optimization, analytics and reporting that give IT more control and visibility over the complete SAN-based storage infrastructure. SANlogics is an innovative, multi-vendor software platform that simplifies and accelerates SAN migration, consolidation, and infrastructure optimization. It combines on-demand data analysis, business-process aware functionality, and rapid execution into a powerful solution that Fortune 500 organizations leverage to upgrade and optimize their IT storage infrastructures.

Storage migration projects are often complex and time consuming, requiring detailed planning to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity. These projects often place a high demand on an organization’s internal IT resources and have a negative effect on the overall storage solvency of the organization during the project. SANpulse provides a customized end-to-end solution that greatly simplifies the storage migration process by leveraging the intelligence of the company’s SANlogics platform.

“Knowledge is power, and the knowledge gained by IT with a complete global view of the storage infrastructure provides the power to optimize that storage with improved utilization of available storage resources for a more capital- and operationally-tuned IT environment” said Mehta.”