Disaster Recovery and Disk-Based Data Protection to Drive European Storage Spending in 2008

According to a new study by IDC, disaster recovery projects and disk-based data protection will help drive storage spending in 2008. The new study analyzes the results of a recent European storage survey (conducted between December 2007 and January 2008) exploring the market drivers impacting current and future storage investments within the region. The study also looks into awareness and adoption levels of several newer storage technologies such as server and storage virtualization, thin/dynamic provisioning, and disk-based data protection (e.g., VTL or CDP).

"Although we are entering uncertain economic times, near unbridled growth of unstructured data coupled with a regional wave of disaster recovery and storage consolidation projects are helping to keep demand for new capacity quite strong," said Eric Sheppard, program manager for IDC’s European Storage service. "As such, it’s not surprising that so many of our survey respondents expect their storage budgets to remain stable this year."

Other discoveries include:

• The use of disk systems for data protection, backup, and recovery is widespread in Europe.
• There is a strong correlation between server and storage virtualization and an equally strong correlation between server virtualization and storage networks.
• Survey respondents expressed a strong desire to reduce the amount of time dedicated to storage provisioning related tasks.
• A significant percentage of those that have deployed storage area networks (SANs) are using iSCSI as their transport protocol.
• A significant percentage of those claiming to have deployed iSCSI SANs also claim to have not deployed Fibre Channel anywhere in their organization. This suggests that iSCSI is helping to increase networked storage adoption in "greenfield" environments.
• Improving recovery time objectives surfaced among the top drivers of virtual tape library systems.

 
IDC