Overland Announces Survey Results

Capacity and utilization planningMore than half of the respondents cite this driver as the most important challenge for the year, exacerbated by explosive data growth and the need to find tools that help manage and reduce copies of data.

Faster business continuity and disaster recovery—Service Level Agreement (SLA) demands are accelerating the need for expedited backup and recovery efforts. Recovering mission-critical applications within four hours was a standard SLA for 74 percent of those surveyed.

Disk-based backup—Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backup is the key to reducing backup windows and improving recovery times, which is why 64 percent of survey respondents plan to deploy some form of disk-based backup in 2008.

Protecting virtual machines—Rapid adoption of virtual machines and VMware creates new data protection and high availability models with 68 percent of the survey participants naming virtual servers as the No. 1 technology to affect storage this year.

Improving recovery speed—Nearly 40 percent of those surveyed will focus on improving recovery speed as part of enhancing their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.

Going ‘green’ with deduplication and VTL—Reducing the volume of data stored and managed is becoming another important element of “green” storage. To that end, more than 40 percent of the survey participants are using disk-based backup to lower their storage overhead while another 31 percent are deploying VTLs and deduplication to reduce storage volumes.

Storage security—Device-specific storage encryption is on the rise, especially as the regulatory and compliance environments dictate a reasonable level of data encryption for all vital data.

Regulatory compliance—SOX, HIPAA, FRCP and other regulations continue to have significant impact on SLAs for restore times, content management, distance replication, secure off-site storage and data retention times.