San Jose, CA - February 13, 2006 - The third edition of the Backup and Archive User Perspective Report reveals major changes. For 2,000 surveyed IT managers the ratio of on-line tape capacity to disk capacity averages about 1.5 today whereas it was about 2.0 in 2004. Planned new growth in media used for archiving/backup shows that disk usage could exceed tape within 2 years.
The window required to do a full backup has been decreasing over the years of our survey. 32% of the IT Managers reported that they require less than 60 minutes for a full backup vs. about 15% in 2004. The goal for retrieving an individual file from archive averages in hours.
IT Managers indicated that the most important archive attributes are high archive reliability, high capacity and long archival retention. WORM capability, offsite transportability and meeting regulatory compliance were less important attributes.
About 55% of the surveyed IT Managers use files as the archive data format now while 42% use volumes and content as the archive data format. Use of volume and content archive formats will increase to close to 80% within two years.
Tighter data retention and recovery legislation has elevated data protection to the top of the IT managers concerns. 37% of the surveyed population rank data protection highest among their storage management challenges. A large majority of the selected respondents consider the backup process unreliable. 45% experience over 10% unsuccessful backups to which one should add an equal number of unsuccessful restores (double that in the 2004 survey).
The survey addressed a random population of 15,000 sites. 2,000 reliable responses form the basis of preliminary findings covering storage configurations and objectives. For a selected population of over 100 IT professionals, this report provides statistics on backup and archive practices, ranks issues and needs, and analyzes tape vs. disk for backup trends and plans.
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Introduction
The survey targeted over one hundred IT managers having storage management or data protection responsibilities for IT operations that store a minimum of one terabyte (TB) of raw disk storage. Out of 15,000 managers contacted, over 2,000 qualified managers (Referred to as the "Screening Survey") answered the full screening survey of less than 10 questions. We selected over two hundred individuals representing sites relatively evenly distributed among the disk capacity ranges, with an attempt to include a sufficient number of representatives from each of nine targeted industries. We submitted them to the full survey of over 50 questions. We received 135 reliable responses. They are referred to as the "Full Survey" or "Selected population".
The Screening Survey population was questioned on their storage configuration as well as their acquisition plans. For the selected population of 135 sites, this survey provides statistics on practices related to Automated Tiered Storage and media used for different storage tiers The report ranks issues and needs, and analyzes trends and acquisition intents.
Nine industries were targeted in this report: Finance/banking, Health, Manufacturing, Retail Distribution, Government, Education, Consulting, Computers and IT, and Telecommunications. The survey reveals interesting peculiarities in each industry practices and requirements.
Objectives
The primary objective of this study is to determine the acceptance of newer techniques oforBackup and Archiving data, as well as user requirements and complaints.
Survey Methodology
To qualify for the survey, the respondent had to be an IT administrator or manager with storage related responsibilities 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 interviews with industry experts and storage vendors · 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.
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