Reliability seen as key requirement for storage
Survey reveals that businesses also value importance of data recovery and continuity
Reliability is the key requirement from storage systems, according to a recent study from the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
The vendor-independent organisation questioned 70 European businesses and found that 76 per cent of respondents saw reliability as a necessity in their storage infrastructure. Data recovery and continuity were also important, according to 72 per cent of those questioned.
Charles Inches, chairman of the SNIA Europe’s end-user advisory board, said: “Business and compliance requirements are placing new pressures on organisations to achieve targets in specific guidelines. This often results in dedicated storage teams working with an array of heterogeneous and complex systems.”
Although the report found that an Information Lifecycle Management strategy is considered important by 62 per cent of respondents, 56 per cent also said it poses certain “integration challenges”.
Compliance was also found to have “a marked impact” on storage capacity, with 54 per cent claiming it will cause significant growth in their storage capacity requirements.
The SNIA discovered that disk-to-disk-to-tape backup technology is considered ready or almost ready for market adoption by almost 68 per cent of respondents.
However, testing and integration of such new equipment was still seen as too time consuming by 59 per cent of respondents.
Steve Derbyshire, managing director of storage VAR Telamon, said: “The results here are very much open to interpretation and based on the questions asked [by the SNIA]. However, reliability, recovery and continuity of data are obviously key issues for any businesses data.”
Stuart Sawle, managing director of storage VAR Sysop, said the study was too small to have a real impact.
“Just asking 70 businesses is a very low figure,” he said. “I don’t believe they provide a complete insight or overview of the storage market.”