Disaster recover and disc-based data drive storage spending

"Although we are entering uncertain economic times, near unbridled growth of unstructured data coupled with a regional wave of disaster recovery and storage consolidation projects are helping to keep demand for new capacity quite strong," said Eric Sheppard, program manager for IDC's European Storage service. "As such, it's not surprising that so many of our survey respondents expect their storage budgets to remain stable this year."

Other factors include:

• The use of disk systems for data protection, backup, and recovery is widespread in Europe.

• There is a strong correlation between server and storage virtualisation and an equally strong correlation between server virtualisation and storage networks.
•  Survey respondents expressed a strong desire to reduce the amount of time dedicated to storage provisioning related tasks.

• A significant percentage of those that have deployed storage area networks (SANs) are using iSCSI as their transport protocol.

• A significant percentage of those claiming to have deployed iSCSI SANs also claim to have not deployed Fibre Channel anywhere in their organisation suggesting that iSCSI is helping to increase networked storage adoption in "greenfield" environments.

•  Improving recovery time objectives surfaced among the top drivers of virtual tape library systems.

 IDC's study entitled Disaster Recovery and Disk-Based Data Protection, Investments Made During Uncertain Times: IDC's Annual European Storage Survey (IDC #RS01Q, January 2008).

Source: http:///www.idc.com