This document offers data and analysis of IDC's 2006 European storage survey, which was conducted by telephone during the fourth calendar quarter of 2006. 504 end users were surveyed in the U.K./Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Nordics. All respondents were either directly involved in storage purchasing or had some type of influence over storage purchases.

"IDC's European storage survey has been conducted consecutively for five years and again in 2006 the vast majority of respondents either predict same size storage budgets, if not increased budgets," said Claus Egge, program director, European Storage research. "Customers have a real demand for many of the exciting developments in storage. The industry's challenge is to understand what they need and to take customers through successful implementation."

Among other things, the 2006 survey was intended to:

• Explore attitudes to past and future investments in storage
• Determine end-user adoption of networked storage
• Explore key drivers for storage and priorities of storage customers
• Look at disk being used in data protection
• Explore customer attitudes towards industry when learning and selecting new solutions