The Economics Of Enterprise Data Protection

In November 2008, SEPATON, Inc., a provider of virtual tape library and data deduplication solutions, conducted a survey of US-based corporations to define and quantify current data protection challenges, business objectives, and technology requirements for enterprise data centers.



The analysis shows that in 2009, enterprise data managers are looking to implement technologies that help them meet the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, dealing with exponential data growth, delivering higher levels of service and meeting more stringent regulatory requirements than ever before. As a result, they are moving away from traditional physical tape and adopting technologies such as deduplication and VTLs that deliver faster performance, higher capacity reduction, enable longer online retention, and provide modular scalability of performance and capacity.

The following bullet points provide summarized results of the survey:
1. Despite current economic pressures, nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or increase in 2009. Enterprises consider the need to protect data assets and keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities.

2. A key focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for data protection. Enterprises are investing in technologies that reduce total cost of ownership by providing higher levels of data protection, control data growth, and scale capacity and performance.

3. Fifty-two percent of users who rated their data protection as insufficient cited lack of budget to keep pace with technology as the cause. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.

4. Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-eight percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Thirty percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at a compounded rate of more than thirty percent per year.

5. While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, fewer than fifty percent expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies disk-to-disk, virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, or VTL gateways.

6. Data deduplication ranks highest as the technology planned for deployment in the enterprise data center. More than ninety percent of respondents are either currently using deduplication or want to use it. Of those who do not have deduplication, fifty-five percent are allocating budget towards this technology in 2009.

7. Server virtualization (VMware) is putting significant strain on data protection environments. Seventy-four percent of respondents report that VMware virtual environments significantly increased their data storage and/or the complexity of their data protection environment.