Gartner has taken issue with Dell's claim that two-fifths of UK IT directors plan to spend between 21 and 40 per cent of their entire IT budgets on storage this year (Story IT Directors rate data storage).

The analyst firm says that storage spending is running at much lower levels than suggested from a recent Dell survey of UK IT directors.

Jeremy Grigg, a research director at Gartner, and an author of the firm's IT Spending and Staffing Survey, estimates that hardware spending as a whole will only account for 20.7 per cent of IT spending this year. "If the 21 to 40 per cent figure relates to all enterprise hardware, I can understand it, but spending that much on storage sounds like Dell putting a marketing spin on data, or even miscollecting data," he said.

Dell declined to comment further on the matter or Gartner's criticisms of its research. ®