A population of over one thousand IT sites involving nine major industries was surveyed and questioned on their Backup and Archive configurations, practices, objectives and plans.

This report provides statistics on practices, ranks issues and needs, indicates satisfaction ratings, and analyzes trends and plans.

The following parameters are analyzed, and peculiarities pertaining to each of the major industries are highlighted

• Servers and Operating System distribution
• DIsk and tape capacity- Versions and copies
• Libraries and Media used and planned
• Applications and Database
• Backup window and utilization of snapshot
• Handling of remote offices, desktop and laptops
• Disk to Disk Backup, and Acceptance of ATA drives
• Reliability Issues
• Criteria for accessing archived data
• Reference Data
• HSM
• Products used, hardware and software
• Product selection criteria
• Satisfaction rating
• Major issues and problems
• Major technologies rating
• Outsourcing practices

Objectives of The Report

Backup and archiving have been constrained for many years by technology and cost. The convergence of factors such as the rapid increase of the volume of data, the threat of disasters, the cost of downtime and the advances of technologies are all fueling a major shift in the way IT managers look at data protection.

Several other factors influenced the changes as well, and they steered our survey questions to attempt to answer each parameter. We all agree on one point, things are bound to change. The unknown is how fast and in what direction. Assessing this was our major goal when we initiated this study and survey

• More specifically, the objectives that we set for this market analysis were to determine:
  · Are various industries reacting differently to the wave change
  · How much data is still unprotected in the corporation, and are IT executives trying to do something about it in the near term
  · How fast have the techniques of real-time backup penetrated the market , and how fast will they spread to the entire organization
  · What are the criteria for selecting a backup or an archive solution
  · How satisfied are IT managers with their present solution, and what are their most urgent requirements
  · Is secondary disk about to supplant tape? In what applications, Who are the more likely candidates for earely market acceptance. What are the perceived pros and cons of disk for backup and archive?
  · Do IT managers suffer from reliability problems, what do they attribute them to?
  · How extensive is the effort to protect remote offices and branches, and how much of a concern is this to IT managers
  · Are desktops, laptops, and mobile computers backed up, and is the situation about to change?

While these were the main objectives, we collected and analyzed several other statistics and demographics, such as storage growth and distribution, SAN configurations, storage budget and staffing, distribution of operating systems, servers, and software and library vendors.

A Brief Summary of some of the findings is given below

"BACKUP AND ARCHIVING- OVER ONE THOUSAND IT SITES SURVEYED"

A population of over one thousand IT sites totaling 320 petabytes of disk storage and 1,050 petabytes of nearline tape storage, was surveyed and questioned on their backup and archiving practices and plans.

The survey reveals that secondary disk is playing an increasingly important role in backing up corporate data. Sixty percent of the population is using disk backup, typically for less than 20% of their data. But, tape remains by far the most popular medium. Snapshot and Virtual Tape, mostly used today in large sites, are poised for a very important growth in mid-size IT operations.

Reliability and performance are cited at the top of the backup product selection criteria, followed by cost, scalability and ease-of-use. When it comes to problems they encounter in backup, reliability and data integrity are again very high, followed by impact of the backup operation on the application and network performance.

Archiving is treated as a separate application from backup by half of the population, with another 21% planning to set it up as a separate application within the next two years. Recent regulations are putting pressure on the need to store historical information. One third of the population claims over 50% of their archived data as "reference data".

HSM has only penetrated 13% of the population today, but its utilization will double within the next two years. Content-addressed storage is deemed very important by 40% of the population

Nine industries were primarily targeted: Finance/banking, health, manufacturing, retail distribution, government, education, consulting, transportation and telecommunications. The survey reveals interesting peculiarities in each industry practices and requirements.

The analysis of this extensive survey which covers over 100 questions. The report provides statistics on practices, ranks issues and needs, indicates satisfaction ratings, and analyzes trends and plans.

Survey Methodology

To qualify for the survey, the respondent had to know storage, have at least half a terabyte of total disk capacity, and have responsibility for backup, archive and/or disaster protection

· We developed a questionnaire in collaboration with a number of industry executives.
· We tested the questionnaire with ten IT managers, in one or several telephone interviews
· We asked several thousands IT managers a limited set of questions to determine if they qualified for the survey. 1071 responded
· Over 400 respondents qualified for the full survey. We selected 100 of them, with an attempt to have a relatively even distribution among the industries, as well as the disk capacity ranges
· We sent a detailed questionnaire of over 100 questions to the selected respondents
· We compiled and analyzed the results
· We called twelve of the respondents to interview them in more details and verify how realistic our findings are.
· We also included comments resulting from the many contacts we have throughout the year with IT managers, independently of this structured survey

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