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New backup technologies
The interest in IP storage indicates a willingness to selectively invest in new technologies. Besides iSCSI, the most notable new technology is disk-to-disk (D2D) backup, which appears to be getting serious investment for the first time. More than half of respondents are increasing spending on D2D, with only 28% spending nothing or decreasing (see "Disk-based backup taking off").
Predictably, the favored route for deploying D2D at this stage is first going to disk and then backing up to tape. The second most popular scenario is backing up to disk and then archiving to tape. More advanced approaches, such as content-addressable storage (CAS) or single-instance file storage, are getting only limited attention (see "Least disruptive disk backup technologies are most popular").
While tape library purchasing appears strong, and disk-to-disk plans include significant use of tape at the end of the line, disaster recovery (DR) will increasingly rely on newer technologies (see "DR not just about tape"). In the last year, remote copy/replication has surpassed off-site tape storage as the primary DR expenditure listed by respondents, and the most recent results confirm that.
DR spending continues to rise. In October 2003, 33% of respondents were increasing their DR spending (see "Surviving and thriving: facing recession and growth"). But in March 2004, that rose to 50%, with another 37% holding the line.
Spending will be up, as well, on compliance in 38% of shops, with 45% holding firm at last year's level. Spending patterns have changed very little for compliance, with tape archiving being the majority approach, followed by disk-to-disk backup (see "Tape most popular compliance tool"). The only technology that seems to be losing favor for compliance is optical write once, ready many (WORM), which dropped from 15% to 10%.
This coming year looks to be a busy one. While many storage managers will be glad to have the budget to buy needed capacity, they probably would have been just as glad to be able to mate those purchases with mature, effective management tools. With SANs spreading into new parts of the enterprise and becoming multiprotocol, still-strapped staffs will have to run even faster to keep up. Buckle up--it's going to be a fast and bumpy ride in 2004.
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