Tape-based backup and recovery processes are gradually being confined to the history books, as the majority of organisations globally are moving to purpose-built backup solutions.
So said Kelly Ferguson, EMEA director of product marketing for EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division, in an interview with ITWeb yesterday.
Ferguson referred to an IDC study, which notes that the worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market experienced exceptional growth in 2011.
According to IDC, worldwide PBBA revenue totalled $2.4 billion in 2011, posting a 43.4% increase over the prior year.
Ferguson believes the growth is due to increased use and adoption of PBBA systems for backup, recovery and storage optimisation with the use of data deduplication.
However, she said tape is still being used and deployed alongside PBBA systems in customer environments, and as an archive platform for open system customers.
“Backup transformation is a journey that organisations have to go through,” Ferguson explained.
Ferguson noted that the most reported barrier to deduplicating backups is the perceived time needed to do so.
“The most reported reason for organisations wanting to stop using tape is the speed of data recoveries and system restores. Most of them also believe not using tape offers a reduced total cost of ownership.”
Referring to another study, by EMC, Ferguson pointed out that European organisations are likely to spend 2.5% to 5% of their IT budgets on IT backup and recovery this year.
She also noted that about two-thirds of organisations believe they are spending the right amount of money on IT backup and recovery.
However, she said the majority of organisations believe disaster recovery solutions are critical only for extreme catastrophes like tsunamis, earthquakes or floods. “These are important even for small things like power outages, which can massively impact on a business,” she notes.
Ferguson said the most reported cause of data loss and/or systems downtime during the past year was hardware failure.
Other causes were loss of power, software failure, data corruption, user error and security breaches, among others.
She also revealed that the most commonly reported consequence of data loss and/or systems downtime is a loss of employee productivity, with more than four in 10 organisations reporting as such.
Share