A population of  two thousand IT sites involving nine major industries was surveyed and questioned on their storage configurations, objectives and plans. 

For over one hundred sites, this report provides statistics on practices for Tiered Storage, ranks issues and needs, and analyzes trends and plans. 

The following parameters are analyzed by storage capacity tiers, and by industry

·         Disk, Tape and Optical Disk - capacity and growth rate

·         Policies for Protecting Business Data

·         HSM and ILM utilization and plans

·         Product selection criteria

·         Satisfaction Ratings

·         Major issues and problems

Objectives of The Report 

In large installations, the number of application hosts and database elements may number in the hundreds. The ability to manage them efficiently becomes critical. Management includes monitoring and reporting, equipment status, media availability, performance, and resource utilization.. Some data are more critical or important than others and must be treated accordingly.

 On average, in sites that have not addressed the problem of  multiple storage policies, 80% of data stored on primary storage systems is not frequently accessed and is a good candidate for migration to secondary storage. 

 By segregating data to secondary and tertiary storage systems, Management  becomes much easier.  This implies the move of different types of data to the lowest-cost storage device possible based on protection, performance, availability and recovery requirements. An HSM and/or ILM software can automate this process, with criteria pre-established by the administrator

 The primary objective of this study is to determine the acceptance of the tiered storage and multiple protection policy concept, as well as user requirements and complaints.  The analysis also provides valuable answers to questions such as:

·         How is the distribution evolving between Fibre/SCSI and ATA/SATA disk drives
·         Status and Plans for acquisition of Automate Storage Tiering product
·         Utilization and acquisition plans for HSM and ILM
·         Backup technology – Tape and Disk Utilization 
·         What additional functions are of most value in association with a Tired Storage offering

 Survey Methodology

 To qualify for the survey, the respondent had to be an IT administrator or manager with storage related responsibilities, have at least two NAS systems, and one terabyte of total disk capacity most of which connected to open systems.

·         We developed a questionnaire in collaboration with a number of industry executives

·         We tested the questionnaire in telephone interviews 

·         We asked several thousands IT managers a limited set of questions to determine if they qualified for the survey. Over 2000 completed these questions

·         We selected about 200 of these screening survey respondents to complete the full survey. We targeted 70% of the population in the small and medium business category with the full survey respondents having mostly open systems and 3 or more NAS.  

·         We sent a detailed questionnaire of over 50 questions to the selected respondents

·         We received over 120 good responses. We compiled and analyzed the results, and compared with results obtained in our 2003 and 2004 surveys

·         We also included comments resulting from the many contacts we have throughout the year with IT managers.