Australian survey sees need for faster data recovery
Australian survey sees need for faster data recovery
Nov 10, 2005: Australian organisations are increasingly embracing the benefits of data protection. However, according to a new Australian storage survey conducted by Sun Microsystems there is a need for faster data recovery drives and disk based data protection.
The survey canvassed 189 storage management personnel in 103 large and medium-sized organisations and found that most Australian organisations now use one or more disk-based data protection methodologies such as disk mirroring (67% of organisations surveyed), disk to disk to tape backup(49%) or disk to disk backup (48%), according to a new data storage survey by Sun Microsystems.
It also found that disk to tape backup is still the most commonly employed data protection methodology, used by 91% of the 103 large and medium Australian organisations surveyed. 85% of backup data still stored on tape at most large and medium Australian organisations.
Other data protection methodologies employed were disk snapshot (38%), virtual tape (16%), continuous data protection (14%) and other methodologies (4%).
The main data protection issues concern speed, cost and reliability, with the complete list of data protection issues being:
Recovery time 75%
Backup window constraints 70%
Cost 48%
Reliability of the current solution 46%
Complexity 42%
Poor disaster recovery and backup strategies 40%
Data integrity (even when backed up) 27%
Inadequate backup systems 26%
Other 8%
"Even with increased disk-based options for data recovery, dataprotection is still fraught with issues," said Rob Nieboer, StorageStrategist for Sun Microsystems. "Some of these issues, such as datarecovery time, can be improved with disk, but others, such ascomplexity, cannot - tape based backup is inherently the simplest backupmethodology and has the added benefit of data portability. And when itcomes to cost, disk-based solutions actually makes things worse.
Sun also quizzed their subjects on information classification practices. Only 28% classified information according to its value to the business and protected it accordingly, a central technique in planning for information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies. A further 50% protected all their information in the same manner regardless of business value.
"It is understandable that organisations lack the resources or the timeto classify their information," said Nieboer "This is symptomatic of thefundamental problem with storage: every year organisations are requiredto store and protect more information with flat or declining storagebudgets. The irony for many organisations is that classifyinginformation and implementing ILM strategies are actually the best way todeal with their underlying storage problems."
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