RenovoData Blog

If only one kind of IT expense bucks the recessionary trend for 2009, it will be storage.  In a recent Gartner storage user survey, 41% of respondents plan to spend more on storage services in 2009 than they did in 2008, while only 7% expect to spend less.  Given the current slump in the global economic climate, the themes of efficiency and cost-savings will continue to drive data protection technology decisions for the upcoming year.   As organizations continue to operate leaner, it will be simple to justify expenses that cut back on backup storage capacity, shift backup costs from a capital to an operating budget, or do away with the need for remote office IT personnel.   IDC forecasts that next year storage will grow more than 50% and that the "size of a company does not determine its challenges:  it merely affects scale."   This analysis leads us to emphasize 5 Top Storage Trends for 2009.

1. Data Deduplication - Affectionately known in the industry as "dedupe", data deduplication is the kind of IT phenomenon that makes customers eager to sign up once they understand its capabilities in cutting back on needlessly duplicated material being stored on and clogging up their servers. As this money and energy-saving technology becomes more mainstream, 2009 will be a signature year for dedupe.

2. Server Virtualization - Server virtualization's role in consolidation, power and cooling and cost-savings outweigh the investments in re-architecting the environment and reinvesting in storage and infrastructure. The biggest impact in the immediate future will be on backup and disaster recovery through eliminating server sprawl, which makes more efficient use of resources and improves server availability.

3. Cloud Services - These offsite services, provided by a third party provider, are part green and part budget-cutting. Offsetting the storage footprint in the local data center by using cloud-based storage for backup, archiving and disaster recovery is gaining increasing popularity. Subscribing to an offsite remote backup service provider helps reduce onsite operational personnel and lower capital investments.

4. Disaster Recovery - Server virtualization, cloud storage, WAN optimization and data deduplication will continue to prompt organizations to institute low cost disaster recover y in 2009. Sometimes a large volume of data becomes problematic for SMBs that have multiple systems to back up and a need to send massive amounts of data across a wire, posing high costs of replication. For those companies that cannot afford to hire a fulltime backup specialist with a high level of expertise, it makes sense to hire a remote backup service provider with a focus on disaster recovery.

5. Storage Consolidation - This theme will extend from data center and server consolidation to converging technology into integrated solutions from a single vendor and vendor consolidation. IT organizations will continue to eliminate point products by choosing platforms and applications with consolidated functionality. In the data protection arena, organizations will benefit from platforms that combine backup with integrated archiving, replication, deduplication, snapshot or reporting. By doing so, businesses will benefit from economies of scale in procuring, deploying, and managing technology and services.

Fun Fact:  In 1956 IBM introduced 305 RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control). It was the size of a refrigerator, and stored a total of 4.4 megabytes on 50 doubled-sided, two-foot-diameter disks. The disk had a density of 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of $10,000,000 per gigabyte.

Answer to question from last week's blog:  A 2006 study from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that of those companies experiencing what was referred to as "significant data loss", 93% went out of business within a five year period.

When you have multiple servers at a site, the conventional method used by many businesses would be to set up a central backup server with a tape library.  The problem with this solution is that it creates a bottleneck and a single point of backup failure within your network.  Also, with slower backup and recovery speeds, no quick 24/7 access to data recovery, human error and the manual intervention required to get data offsite, tapes have proved to be an unreliable method.  This often cumbersome and lengthy process as a means of data protection can negatively impact the business recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) for your company, and compromises critical business practices such as complying with regulatory requirements.  For the same reasons that mp3 players are more commonly used today while music tapes are pretty much obsolete, remote backup is a better and more advanced solution for protecting your business-critical data.

In the event of a disaster, if employees are on vacation, managing a data center can pose a major challenge.  Remote backup solutions can be specified as a managed service to be installed into the existing infrastructure of your company ran by IT administrators.  If personnel are inaccessible during a critical time such as a server crash, an offsite solution is the guaranteed means of business continuity and disaster recovery.

Trivia Question:  What percentage of companies experiencing significant data loss go out of business within five years?

I was happy to learn that of the 12 technologies that CRN magazine (September 15, 2008) reported to be most needed by midsized businesses, RenovoData addresses 5 of them.  They are: 1) Virtualization; 2) Data Loss Prevention; 3) Data Deduplication; 4) Software-as-a-Service and 5) Mobile Security. 

According to CRN, typical midmarket CIOs are facing the same struggles that their counterparts are at large enterprises but they're having to deal with more limited budgets.  Not a surprise given the current state of the economy.  In fact, I think the economic downturn will actually accelerate the trend for midsized companies to adopt hosted alternatives as credit markets remain tight through 2009.  As CIOs are forced to do more with less, in the face of more dispersed workforces and craftier threats, the prospect of secure hosted offsite data backup and DR is becoming a more viable alternative for them.    

In case you are wondering what the other 7 technologies are, they are: Blade servers; Unified Communication; Videoconferencing; Network Management; Perimeter Security; Data Center Cooling and Business Applications.