For Sepaton, Large Enterprises Plan to Maintain or Increase Data Protection Budgets in 2009

SEPATON, Inc. announced the results of a survey of large enterprise companies with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect conducted in November 2008. Within three business days, nearly 600 IT professionals responded, including 145 responses that matched SEPATON’s criteria for an enterprise company as described above. This high response underscores the top-of-mind nature and importance of these subjects.

Key findings include:

Despite current economic pressures, nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or increase in 2009. Enterprises consider the need to protect data assets and to keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities.
A key focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for data protection. Enterprises are investing in technologies that reduce total cost of ownership by providing higher levels of data protection, control data growth, and scale capacity and performance.
Fifty-two percent of users who rated their data protection as insufficient cited “lack of budget to keep pace with technology” as the cause. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.
Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-eight percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Thirty percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at a compounded rate of more than thirty percent per year.
While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, fewer than fifty percent expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies — disk-to-disk, virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, or VTL gateways.
Data deduplication ranks highest as the technology planned for deployment in the enterprise data center. More than ninety percent of respondents are either currently using deduplication or want to use it. Of those who do not have deduplication, fifty-five percent are allocating budget towards this technology in 2009.
Server virtualization (VMware) is putting significant strain on data protection environments. Seventy-four percent of respondents reported that VMware virtual environments significantly increased their data storage and/or the complexity of their data protection environment.

“This survey shows that in 2009, enterprise data managers are looking to implement technologies that help them meet the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data while delivering higher levels of service and meeting more stringent regulatory requirements, all without adding administration cost, data center space or power requirements,” said Mike Worhach, SEPATON’s president and CEO. “As a result, they are moving away from traditional physical tape and adopting technologies such as deduplication and VTLs that deliver faster performance, higher capacity reduction, enable longer online retention, and provide modular scalability of performance and capacity.”

To download the full survey results report (after registration)