Archiving To Dominate Storage Concerns For 2008
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on December 3, 2007 at 11:33 am
Data archiving and disaster recovery (DR) are likely to dominate the storage related IT considerations of IT organisations as they plan for 2008, according to a survey of 472 IT executives across UK and North America.
BridgeHead Software’s Annual Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Audit 2007 reveals that IT executives listed archiving of file data (57 per cent), email (55 per cent) and database data (42 per cent) as three of their top five storage related areas of interest over coming months. The other two issues within the top five were DR (59 per cent) and backup (55 per cent).
IT Departments Top Ten Storage Related Concerns
1. Disaster recovery (59%)
2. File Archiving (57%)
3. Email Archiving (55%)
4. Backup (55%)
5. Database Archiving (42%)
6. Continuous Data Protection (26%)
7. Encryption of archived data (22%)
8. Storage management/ILM (13%)
9. Storage resource management (12%)
10. Secondary storage consolidation (10%)
Tony Cotterill, CEO and President of BridgeHead Software explained: “Disaster recovery and backup rightly figured highly on the list, along with continuous data protection – which came sixth. 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 organization’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.”
Another issue identified by the research was ‘green’ storage which is likely to grow into an even bigger concern in 2008, with 84 per cent of IT executives complaining that storage vendors should be doing more to improve the energy efficiency of their products.
When asked what factors are driving interest in archiving, the top issue highlighted by the survey sample was disaster recovery (75 per cent) followed by regulatory compliance (58 per cent) and data growth (51 per cent).
As already discussed, DR has long been high on the IT agenda. What the data shows and what may not be generally appreciated is that archiving technology can greatly improve an organization’s ability to recover operations in response to disaster. Multi-copy archiving of fixed content and historical data (the vast majority of an organization’s total online data) provides a cost effective alternative to the more expensive backup and replication which are often best reserved for use on active data only. At the same time that archiving reduces the cost of storing data over the long-term and provides an alternative level of data protection, it also directly ensures compliance with the ever-increasing regulations surrounding long-term data storage and accessibility. In order to comply with new regulations and standards, IT departments are introducing advanced archiving technologies to manage data throughout its lifecycle, guaranteeing data retention, data authenticity, security, compliant media support and handling, and end-of-life destruction.
Data growth is an interesting archiving driver, because the survey indicates that many organizations are currently absorbing data growth by expanding their primary storage capacity. The proportion of organizations holding over 1TB on primary storage has increased from 59 per cent in 2006 to 73 per cent in the 2007 ILM Audit. And at the top end, one in five (21 per cent) of all organizations are now holding over 10TB of data on primary storage.
But the research reveals that between 30 to 50 per cent of data held on primary storage is inactive and unlikely to be accessed again. 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.
While the survey reveals a clear intent to archive, 15 per cent of organizations still do not archive at all. And it is important that those who do are taking it seriously and investing in the right systems and processes explained Cotterill:
“45 per cent of the survey respondents said they are currently using manual systems for archiving. This can be time consuming, laborious and susceptible to human error and as data accumulates, these organizations are in danger of finding their data management problems getting worse.
“We also believe that organisations need to move away from departmental archiving and the isolated archive devices which dominate today, often acquired without IT consideration by finance and other business departments. A more effective approach is an enterprise wide system which provides the ability to archive all data types from across the whole organization, regardless of primary storage platform or location. This can help streamline archiving activities under the control of IT and enable the volume of archived data to reach a critical mass that can really help to free up primary storage systems, relieve storage management pressures and start to reduce costs.”
These findings are part of a broader survey entitled The ILM Audit, conducted by eMedia on behalf of BridgeHead Software during August 2007. 324 Senior level executives, IT managers, system and network administrators and engineers from North America and 148 from the United Kingdom completed the survey.
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