Managing Data Center “Sprawl” and Improving Big Backup Efficiency Key Concerns

SEPATON, Inc. announced the results of the SEPATON Data Protection Index, an annual survey of large enterprises in North America and Europe with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50TB of primary data to protect.

The survey was conducted in April 2012 and elicited responses from 93 IT professionals across a range of vertical industries.
 
The objective of the SEPATON Data Protection Index was to understand and quantify the data protection issues and concerns facing today’s large enterprises with big backup environments and the trends that matter most to enterprise managers.
 
Key findings include:

• Enterprises continue to face the challenges of protecting enormous data volumes and handling rapid data growth. Data growth continues unabated with 50% of respondents reporting their data was growing from twenty to 70% annually and an additional 20% reported even higher annual growth rates.
• Data centers now face a growing challenge of ‘sprawl’ as they add more and more systems to handle data growth. 50% characterize their environments as having ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’ sprawl requiring them to routinely add data protection systems to scale performance or capacity.
• Increasing capacity and performance of the data protection systems are the top priorities for the coming months. Fast growing data volumes and data center sprawl are driving a need for scalable high performance.
• Improving efficiency of the big backup environment also a key priority. Data centers need a way to ensure they are getting the most value from their backup environment. Deduplication is either not being used at all on databases (38%) or not seen as adequately controlling data growth and capacity costs associated with databases (26%) in large enterprises.

"As the survey report reveals, respondents reported a marked increase in annual data growth. Nearly one quarter of respondents reported 25% higher growth rate compared to last year," said Joe Forgione, SVP, product operations and business development, SEPATON. "One of the consequences of this accelerating data growth is data center ‘sprawl’ as enterprise IT departments with non-scalable data protection systems are forced to add new systems to scale capacity or performance. We expect an increase in the need to replace siloed systems with scalable data protection platforms and better deduplication solutions to address data capacity growth."

To download the survey (registration needed)