Databases Most Critical Elements to Backup and Restore

The top challenges that British storage managers face are to better protect business-critical applications and to demonstrate a measurable return on total cost of ownership. These are the findings of a new SEPATON, Inc.‘ survey of 100 storage managers from the FTSE 1000. Other challenges cited included pressure to streamline business processes and the need to meet the service level agreement dictated by the business.

The survey of British businesses took place in October and November by SEPATON.

Almost two-thirds (60%) of participants said databases were the most critical element of the business to backup and restore, followed by email (29%), Unix file and print data (22%) and Windows file and print data (21%).

Despite the majority of survey participants stating that business databases were the most critical for backup and restore, when asked if their disaster recovery plan protected their entire database, 30% said it did not.

Almost all the respondents said they expected data growth to continue, with the majority (62%) estimating their annual data growth to be between 11 and 25%; a fifth (21%) expecting growth of 26 to 50%; and 5% expecting data growth to be between 50 and 100% in the next year.

When asked about the volume of data they stored, 48% said six to 20 terabytes (TB), 16% had 21-50 TB, 14 percent answered 51-100TB , 15 percent had between 101 and 200 TB and 7 percent were handling more than 200 terabytes of data.

The majority of storage managers said that they conduct ongoing and frequent incremental backups. 64% stated they conduct daily incremental backups, 17% conduct continuous incremental backups and 10% carry out incremental backups more than once a day. 4% stated they only conduct incremental backups on a weekly basis, and 5% admitted they didn’t have a set schedule, performing varied incremental backups or simply not doing them at all.

As expected, full backups were done less frequently, with the majority (59%) conducting them on a weekly basis, almost a quarter (24%) on a daily basis, 12% monthly and 2% quarterly. 3% said they conducted full backups continuously.

Of the respondents, only 9% said that they do not use tapes in their backup. Of those that do, the retention rates required to maintain internal SLAs varied considerably, with 10% keeping tapes indefinitely; 18% keeping them between three and five years; 12% keeping them for one to three years; 14% keeping them from six months to a year; and 29% keeping them for one to six months. 3% kept tapes for less than one month, and the remainder did not have a set retention period in place.

50% of all the respondents still used a backup tape company to store cartridges offsite.

Christo Conidaris, EMEA director for SEPATON said: “Storage managers are good at being under pressure – they need to be. Every day they face demands for quicker restore and backup across an increasing range of databases and applications, then they face the fallout of the resulting data growth. On top of it all, they are under pressure to meet business-specified SLAs and achieve a demonstrable return on investment.”

He concluded: “Tape simply cannot keep up with this pace and scale. Storage managers are finding salvation in technologies such as deduplication, replication and virtual tape libraries (VTL), that can provide longer online retention, faster performance, optimised capacity, enhanced data protection and ensure a manageable total cost of ownership. SEPATON is well positioned with solutions that address these customer needs.”