SEPATON/InfoStor Magazine Survey Highlights Trends & Risks of Data Protection in Large Enterprises

March 04, 2008

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)

SEPATON, Inc., the leader in enterprise-class data protection solutions, today announced the results of an online survey of InfoStor magazine readers. The survey revealed insights into data protection trends in disk-based backup/recovery technologies such as virtual tape libraries (VTLs), data deduplication, and continuous data protection (CDP).

The majority of survey responses were from large enterprises with more than $1 billion in annual revenue (44.2 percent of responses) and more than 200 TB of data to protect (24.8 percent of responses). Respondents include a representative sampling of InfoStor’s subscriber base, a total of 113 responses.

Key survey findings include:

• Enterprises are still relying heavily on physical tape systems for their data protection and disaster recovery. More than half of the respondents move tapes to a remote data center or corporate site for disaster protection.

• Tape systems are not delivering the level of backup and restore performance or disaster protection that enterprises need. Changes to current enterprise data protection environments are being driven most often by disaster recovery initiatives and by data recoverability issues.

• Nearly one third of respondents rated their inability to meet restore objectives as the greatest vulnerability of their data protection strategy. Almost as many felt their greatest vulnerability lay in their inability to meet backup windows. Both of these issues are essentially performance-related.

• Another third of the respondents chose a lack of off-site strategy as their greatest vulnerability.

• Funding limitations and cost savings initiatives are critical factors in implementing improvements to the data center. Almost half of the respondents felt that limited funding was the main reason for not addressing their vulnerabilities while 42.3 percent felt that cost savings was a primary driver for change in their data protection environments.

Given the concerns noted above, 83 percent are planning to deploy either a disk-to-disk or a disk-based VTL solution and 28.7 percent are planning to implement electronic remote replication. When asked what technology they would implement if their budget was unlimited, the majority chose electronic remote replication.

“Our survey results mirror what we’re hearing from our Fortune 1000 customers. Large enterprises remain focused on improving one of their most painful processes - meeting backup and recovery windows without impacting performance, all while reducing data center costs,” said Asim Zaheer, vice president of marketing, SEPATON, Inc. “In addition, virtual tape libraries with deduplication and online remote replication capabilities protect data in a fraction of the time required by tape or disk-to-disk systems.”

For more details, interested parties can download the full survey results report at http://www.sepaton.com/resources/public/InfoStorSurveyReport.pdf

About InfoStor

InfoStor, published by PennWell Corp., is a leading monthly publication and Web site dedicated solely to coverage of the data storage market and technologies. For more information, visit www.infostor.com

About SEPATON, Inc.

SEPATON® helps enterprises reduce risk and improve operational efficiency in the data center with the industry’s fastest, most scalable virtual tape library solution. Built on our patented ContentAware™ architecture, SEPATON products enable enterprises to consolidate and protect information by deduplicating, backing up and restoring petabytes of data at wire speed without disruption to their existing infrastructure. We combine these products with proven methodologies and in-depth services expertise to deliver a measurable return on investment. For additional information, visit www.sepaton.com.

SEPATON, SRE, S2100, and Site2 are registered trademarks of SEPATON Corporation. ContentAware and DeltaStor are trademarks of SEPATON Corporation. All other brand and product names are or may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact:
SEPATON, Inc.
Beth Winkowski, 978-649-7189
bwinkowski@att.net