Archiving set to dominate storage concerns for 2008
1 min read
Data archiving and disaster recovery are likely to dominate storage-related IT considerations for IT departments as they plan for 2008.
BridgeHead Software’s annual Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) audit 2007 – taking the views of 472 IT executives across UK and North America – reveals that archiving file data (57%), email (55%) and database data (42%) are among the top five storage issues. The others are disaster recovery (59%) and backup (55%).
Continuous Data Protection follows at 26%; then encryption of archived data (22%); storage management/ILM (13%); storage resource management (12%) and finally secondary storage consolidation (10%).
Says BridgeHead CEO Tony Cotterill: “There has been a clear movement over the last few years to make data highly available and rapidly recoverable to support electronic business applications as they became more key to an organisation’s performance and bottom line – and as disk storage prices have dropped.
“But now there is real momentum building up behind archiving as the data volumes on primary storage have grown out of control. Organisations have started to use archiving to reduce the cost of storing data, make electronic information more accessible to the organisation, and impose IT standards for how data is managed.”
Data growth is a serious archiving driver, with the survey indicating that many organisations are currently absorbing data growth simply by expanding primary storage capacity. The proportion of organisations holding over 1TB on primary storage has increased from 59% in 2006 to 73% in the 2007 ILM Audit.
At the top end, one in five of all organisations are now holding over 10TB of data on primary storage. Yet the research also reveals that between 30 to 50% of data held on primary storage is inactive and unlikely to be accessed.
“Archiving systems can help to address the data growth challenge by automatically moving this inactive data off the primary store to low-cost disk, tape, and optical storage – maintaining the required level of access and security, while preserving higher-cost storage assets for data that is actively being used and greatly reducing the administrative burden of backing up and managing primary storage,” says Cotterill.
