Disk Surpasses Tape and Optical as Archiving Destination of Choice

Permabit Technology Corporation, in scalable, data-reduced storage for enterprise archiving, announced the results from a survey of IT decision makers that reveals key trends in the enterprise archiving market. More than half indicated that their perception of high cost was the number one reason for not implementing an archiving solution, and 40 percent said that reliability was the primary consideration when choosing an archiving solution. According to the survey results there is a decisive trend away from tape and optical as archiving media: only a quarter of those surveyed consider tape to still be an archiving destination, and only 13 percent use optical, while 45 percent of respondents described their archiving strategy as moving data from primary storage to secondary disk storage.

The survey also revealed that 60 percent of respondents have more than 40 percent static data in their data centers, and for one third of respondents, up to 60 percent of their primary data store is static. Of those surveyed, 43 percent are paying $25-$40+ per gigabyte for primary storage. This demonstrates that the majority of enterprises are paying excessive sums on transaction-optimized storage to manage huge amounts of data that has not been accessed for 90 days or more and should be archived. In addition, three quarters of respondents answered that their primary storage budget for next year will be the same or smaller, suggesting that IT will be required to find a more effective way to manage primary storage.

"The continued pressure to manage primary storage budgets is forcing IT organizations to implement effective archiving solutions sooner rather than later," said Permabit CEO, Tom Cook. "This survey confirms our view that there is a significant need for a cost-effective, reliable disk-based archive solution. We’re uniquely positioned to address this market with the Permabit Enterprise Archive solution and its ability to efficiently and reliably store massive amounts of data in a secure disk-based archive."

Other significant results from the survey include:

• A quarter of those surveyed are managing 100TB of data or more.
• 42 percent consider the difficulty in conducting searches to be the chief complaint with their current archiving solution.
• 80 percent consider the ability to search data an important consideration when choosing an archiving solution.
• 45 percent do not have an archive strategy

"These survey results are consistent with our archiving market research," said Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "As more customers realize the demands of information retention posed by regulations, electronic discovery and the need to access aged information for reference purposes, they will also recognize the need for scalable, cost-effective archiving solutions such as the one offered by Permabit."

About the Permabit Enterprise Archive Survey
Conducted in June 2008, the Permabit survey polled 137 IT professionals in an eight question online survey to gauge their companies’ plans to address the growing costs of primary storage and implement enterprise archiving solutions.