A new Gartner study reveals that data growth is the biggest hardware infrastructure challenge facing the larger enterprise. Of those polled, 47% put the challenge as one of the top three today. Next up on the headache list are system performance and scalability.

Which, given that data workloads are tied to both those issues, makes data the number one hurdle. So there's little surprise that 62% of survey respondents plan to invest in data archiving technologies by the end of next year.

Tech spend will also be doled out on data security and reduction tools, and IT efforts around storage consolidation and management tools.

The good news though is that enterprises are not hitting data capacity limits yet, which is likely due to good strategic planning over the past few years. The bad news though is that infrastructures are aging fast.

""Many data center managers were forced to defer infrastructure upgrades and extend technology refresh cycles in 2009 and, as a result, are now dealing with an aging infrastructure or, in some cases, product obsolescence," said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst.