Research reveals disk-based storage is on the rise in Australia and Asia Pacific

August 02, 2007
Network Appliance  and Symantec Corp today announced findings from the storage industry’s first annual survey of worldwide adoption trends and satisfaction with current data-protection technologies.

The survey, which was conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Network Appliance and Symantec, reveals Australia has one of the high adoption rates of disk-based data protection storage solutions.

The results show Australian and Asia Pacific respondents are more inclined to adopt advanced disk-based data
protection solutions (31% in APAC versus 21% in North America) than their global counterparts. They also reveal the Asia Pacific region has the high adoption rates of continuous data protection (CDP) and the second higher adoption of both virtual tape library (VTL) and snapshot technologies.

“In Australia, we’ve noticed a definite shift toward disk-based data protection solutions and a reduced reliance on tape,” said Mark Heers, director, marketing and alliances, ANZ at Network Appliance.

“We attribute this to the challenge that many IT managers and CIOs face, which is to improve business processes and make everything ‘do more’, whilst at the same time, maintaining data security and compliance and reducing enterprise-wide costs.”

“Backup is a crucial component of any organisation’s IT strategy, so it needs to integrate seamlessly with a company’s existing infrastructure,” said Paul Lancaster, systems engineering manager, Symantec, Australia and New Zealand.

“It’s important for IT managers to be able to master the complexity of the data centre, which is one of the benefits both Symantec and NetApp provide through a standardised software platform from Symantec and a standardised storage platform from NetApp”.

“Standardised platforms mean backup systems can easily grow with a business, while remaining fully integrated throughout the life of that business.”

According to the survey, enterprises will shift more of their backups to disk (on average, enterprises predict a 40/60 disk-to-tape ratio in two years) but tape will remain a part of the majority of enterprises’ data protection strategies for the foreseeable future.

“Enterprises can incorporate disk into their data protection strategy in multiple ways,” Heers added.

“It can be used to store as much back-up data online as possible to provide instant access and faster restore of data for critical applications, or it can be used as a staging area to speed backups before the data is ultimately vaulted to tape for long-term backup archiving”.

“Every organisation should be planning to make disk their primary recovery point.”

“A company’s data protection strategy is considered effective when it has in place the most cost-effective backup and recovery solution. In the coming years, companies will see that the ultimate way to achieve their desired service levels will be with a mix of both disk and tape-based technologies,” said Lancaster.

Some of the key findings of the report include:

Enterprise adoption of tape is almost ubiquitous, but adoption of disk-based data protection solutions is already strong – 65% of Australia and Asia Pacific respondents are backing up to disk. It is clear that disk-based data protection has emerged from an early-adopter market phase to an expanding market phase.

Overall, enterprises are not necessarily “dissatisfied” with tape but are more “satisfied” to “very satisfied” with disk-based solutions which implies that disk-based solutions are achieving their advertised benefits (faster backups and restores). There remains room for improvement in cost effectiveness and overall management.

The key driver of disk-based data protection adoption is increasing data capacities.

Due to this avalanche of data, enterprises are unable to meet current backup windows or improve/maintain current service levels with their existing tape-based solutions alone.

Enterprises will invest more on disk but will continue to invest in tape to meet huge capacity requirements. Enterprises use disk in their data protection strategies in multiple ways: as a staging area to meet backup windows before ultimately vaulting data to tape and as the primary backup repository.