Scary Storage Factoids

What makes IT surveys so compelling? For one thing, we all want to know what people are thinking. There's safety in numbers: If everyone's on board, a trend must be worth following -- right?

Surveys can also be troubling, revealing dangerous or dire developments and habits that need changing. And when it comes to storage networking, recent surveys have turned up a few revelations of this ilk.

Sure, some of these results come from surveys commissioned by vendors. Still, that doesn't make them inaccurate, especially if there's a third party in control. At the very least, the bad news contained in these polls is a sort of heads up, a reminder of something that may be a problem, or a problem in the making.

In the spirit of the season, then, we offer you the following set of "Scary Storage Factoids," culled from various surveys of the IT scene.

Got a scary factoid of your own? Hit that message board below the article.Scary Factoid #1: Tape backup is more popular than disk backup in the U.S. Roughly 63 percent of U.S. respondents (from a total of roughly 800 worldwide) use tape media for backup, as opposed to disk, removable media, optical storage, or other forms of storage. Source: Symantec's "State of the Data Center Report."

Scary Factoid #2: According to the same study, over 80 percent of U.S. respondents restore from backup after an outage. The implication here is that at least 60 percent of U.S. companies interviewed are relying on backup tapes for data restoration. Iron Mountain, wail on! Source: Symantec, as above.

Scary Factoid #3: "A recent survey by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) finds that while 80 percent of companies it surveyed must retain emails and other e-records for at least 50 years, 70 percent say they are 'highly dissatisfied' with their long-term ability to read those records." Source: SNIA.

Scary Factoid #4: Human error, nothing else, accounts for 28 percent of most data center unplanned downtime. In contrast, hardware accounts for 25 percent of failures; software, for 23 percent; power outages, 11 percent; natural disasters, 6 percent; and other causes, 7 percent. Source: Symantec, as above.

Scary Factoid #5: Of 369 IT decision makers, 63 percent said their data centers had run out of space, power, or cooling capacity without warning; 43 percent said they could stay in their current data center infrastructures for only another six months to one year if nothing changed; and 40 percent of respondents had not discussed a green initiative within their companies. Source: ONStor Inc.Scary Factoid #6: "While 91 percent of IT organisations carry out full scenario testing of their disaster recovery plans incorporating relevant people, processes and technologies, nearly 50 percent of those tests fail." Source: Symantec, as above.

Scary Factoid #7: Venture capitalists are investing less in IT in general. During the third quarter of 2007, U.S. VCs"saw 10 percent fewer deals and 5 percent fewer dollars invested than during the same period last year. The data showed that there were 367 completed venture rounds for IT companies, accounting for $3.77 billion." But in the first quarter, there were 435 rounds. Source: Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young LLP Quarterly Report.

Scary Factoid #8: IT spending will remain stable through the end of 2007, but it will likely decelerate early in 2008. . For now, it looks like "[w]eighted-average 2008 IT spending growth expectations [including salaries, operations costs, depreciation, and other costs in addition to capital outlay] are almost 100 basis points lower than 2007, while weighted-average 2008 capital spending growth expectations are nearly 150 basis points lower." The causes are largely macroeconomic. Source: Goldman Sachs

Scary Factoid #9: Of 300 North American IT managers, 71 percent reported that performance issues occur in production environments, versus pre-deployment. Source: F5 Networks.

Scary Factoid #10: Over 55 percent of respondents to a poll think patent litigation is a waste of resources, or that governments need to mandate changes to it; but over 30 percent say it's a fact of life we need to get used to. Source: Byte and Switch.Happy Halloween!

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