Data backup and restore challenges surveyed

The top challenges that British storage managers face are to better protect business-critical applications and to demonstrate a measurable return on total cost of ownership. These are the findings of a new SEPATON survey of 100 storage managers from the FTSE 1000. Other challenges cited included pressure to streamline business processes and the need to meet the service level agreement dictated by the business.

The survey of British businesses took place in October and November.

Almost two-thirds (60 percent) of participants said databases were the most critical element of the business to backup and restore, followed by email (29 percent), Unix file and print data (22 percent) and Windows file and print data (21 percent).

Despite the majority of survey participants stating that business databases were the most critical for backup and restore, when asked if their disaster recovery plan protected their entire database, 30 percent said it did not.

Almost all the respondents said they expected data growth to continue, with the majority (62 percent) estimating their annual data growth to be between 11 and 25 percent; a fifth (21 percent) expecting growth of 26 to 50 percent; and 5 percent expecting data growth to be between 50 and 100 percent in the next year.

When asked about the volume of data they stored, 48 percent said six to 20 terabytes (TB), 16 percent had 21-50 TB, 14 percent answered 51-100TB, 15 percent had between 101 and 200 TB and 7 percent were handling more than 200 terabytes of data.

The majority of storage managers said that they conduct ongoing and frequent incremental backups. Sixty-four percent stated they conduct daily incremental backups, 17 percent conduct continuous incremental backups and 10 percent carry out incremental backups more than once a day. Four percent stated they only conduct incremental backups on a weekly basis, and 5 percent admitted they didn't have a set schedule, performing varied incremental backups or simply not doing them at all.

As expected, full backups were done less frequently, with the majority (59 percent) conducting them on a weekly basis, almost a quarter (24 percent) on a daily basis, 12 percent monthly and 2 percent quarterly. 3 percent said they conducted full backups continuously.

Of the respondents, only 9 percent said that they do not use tapes in their backup. Of those that do, the retention rates required to maintain internal SLAs varied considerably, with 10 percent keeping tapes indefinitely; 18 percent keeping them between three and five years; 12 percent keeping them for one to three years; 14 percent keeping them from six months to a year; and 29 percent keeping them for one to six months. 3 percent kept tapes for less than one month, and the remainder did not have a set retention period in place.

50 percent of all the respondents still used a backup tape company to store cartridges offsite.

http://www.sepaton.com

•Date: 26th Nov 2009• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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