CommVault Survey: Top 2011 Five IT Concerns for Simpana Customers

CommVault has released the results of its IT Storage Spending Survey, which polled a cross-section of more than 350 of its existing, global Simpana software customers. This included individuals responsible for IT budget allocations encompassing storage and data management such as CIOs, vice presidents and IT directors as well as backup, server and storage group managers or administrators.

According to the survey results, managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) is the top budget priority for 2011, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software and data backup and recovery.

Nearly 30 percent of the survey respondents revealed their IT budgets would increase in 2011 while almost 50 percent reported their budgets would remain unchanged in the New Year. Of that IT budget, 43 percent of those polled reported allocating up to 10 percent for overall data protection while another 36 percent planned to spend between 11 and 20 percent of their budget on data protection hardware, software, services/support and media.

Of those surveyed, 54 percent reported no expected increases in IT headcount in 2011; 20 percent reported an increase and 26 percent remained undecided on changes to their staffing in the year ahead.

More than 60 percent of the respondents polled for this IT Storage Spending Survey came from organizations with between 500 to 10,000 employees, representing a variety of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail. Nearly 50 percent of the respondents were responsible for managing between six to 25 TBs of primary data last year; 22 percent managed less than 25 physical servers while 24 percent managed less than 25 virtual servers currently.

Simpana Software Enables Optimized IT Budgets
for Improved IT Storage Spending

• More than 40 percent of the survey respondents spent more on backup and recovery, data reduction or backing up virtual server environments than initially budgeted for in the past year. In ranking their No. 1 IT budget priority for 2011, however, less than 10 percent cited backup and recovery as their highest budget priority, which underscores the continuing need to allocate funds across a variety of pressing areas, including network and equipment, disaster recovery, as well as applications and software. In contrast, managing data growth received the top ranking for budget priority with 16 percent of the votes.
• Increasingly, CommVault customers are embracing Simpana 9 software to address their most pressing IT challenges while optimizing their budgets. In particular, organizations are taking advantage of the company’s third-generation deduplication with fully integrated source- and target-side deduplication for reducing the amount of backup and archive data stored to disk, tape or the cloud by up to 90 percent.
• Simpana software is suited to alleviate the challenges of protecting sprawling virtual environments by enabling companies to deploy truly unified data management and virtual server protection that meets the needs of today’s modern data centers.
• CommVault’s policy-driven data management platform protects, stores and recovers vast amounts of data while automating administration. The ability to eliminate manual processes and seamlessly tier data to physical, virtual and cloud storage decreases administrative costs and increases operational efficiencies, letting IT departments do more with less resources.
• With Simpana 9, CommVault has also simplified its licensing model to provide customers nearly unlimited use of important features while charging only by the amount of capacity protected. These customers maintain visibility into capacity and growth with usage and trending dashboards that refresh daily to help them manage their storage budgets better.

David West, vice president of marketing and business development for CommVault, said: "The results of CommVault’s IT storage spending survey underscore what our customers have been telling us: the continuing data glut is creating undue cost as well as risk of data loss and business disruption. They need to fix these problems without dramatically increasing their budgets, which has been a recurring theme for the past several years. In 2011, companies will still need to do more with less, but they’re also investing more in modern solutions that solve these real-world IT challenges while leveraging budget allocations to the fullest."