Survey highlights trends and risks of data protection in large enterprises

SEPATON, Inc., has published the results of a survey of InfoStor magazine readers. The survey revealed insights into data protection trends in disk-based backup / recovery technologies such as virtual tape libraries (VTLs), data deduplication, and continuous data protection (CDP).

The majority of survey responses were from large enterprises with more than $1 billion in annual revenue (44.2 percent of responses) and more than 200 TB of data to protect (24.8 percent of responses). Respondents include a representative sampling of InfoStor's subscriber base.

Key survey findings include:

- Enterprises are still relying heavily on physical tape systems for their data protection and disaster recovery. More than half of the respondents move tapes to a remote data center or corporate site for disaster protection.

- Tape systems are not delivering the level of backup and restore performance or disaster protection that enterprises need. Changes to current enterprise data protection environments are being driven most often by disaster recovery initiatives and by data recoverability issues.

- Nearly one third of respondents rated their inability to meet restore objectives as the greatest vulnerability of their data protection strategy. Almost as many felt their greatest vulnerability lay in their inability to meet backup windows. Both of these issues are essentially performance-related.

- Another third of the respondents chose a lack of off-site strategy as their greatest vulnerability.

- Funding limitations and cost savings initiatives are critical factors in implementing improvements to the data center. Almost half of the respondents felt that limited funding was the main reason for not addressing their vulnerabilities while 42.3 percent felt that cost savings was a primary driver for change in their data protection environments.

Given the concerns noted above, 83 percent are planning to deploy either a disk-to-disk or a disk-based VTL solution and 28.7 percent are planning to implement electronic remote replication. When asked what technology they would implement if their budget was unlimited, the majority chose electronic remote replication.

For more details download the full survey results report here (PDF).

•Date: 6th March 2008• Region:US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
Rate this article or make a comment - click here