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On the flip side, spending on disk for backup has held fairly steady, with 80% saying they'll maintain or increase their spending in the latest survey (the same percentage as last spring). Perhaps the most interesting development in disk-based backup, however, is the rising interest in data deduplication (or single-instance storage) technology. In the spring, approximately 12% of respondents said they planned to deploy deduplication; six months later, 20% of those surveyed now say deduplication is in their plans.
We posed a new question in the most recent survey, asking respondents to rank the importance of a specific functionality in the backup apps they'll consider. The ability to back up to disk is the most favored function (56%), which seems to dovetail with the declining interest in tape as a backup medium.
On the horizon
Encryption isn't a new technology, but many storage managers seem to treat it as something new and unusual. Last spring, we initiated a question about storage security and found that 55% of respondents hadn't taken any serious steps in that direction. This fall, the results are even bleaker, with 58% still sitting on the encryption sidelines. That's not to suggest that there isn't interest: 26% report they have implemented or plan to implement encryption this year (vs. 22% last spring), while another 39% say they'll evaluate it (vs. 40% in the spring survey).
Other new technologies and processes made some modest inroads, with more respondents implementing SAN/NAS gateways (37%), wide-area replication (31%) and service-level agreements (27%). Approximately 26% of respondents intend to bolster their disaster recovery (DR) plans with new DR monitoring tools. But some technologies are still struggling to gain acceptance and adoption, with more than 60% of respondents saying they have no immediate plans for or won't implement chargeback, ediscovery tools, automated provisioning systems, WORM media or wide-area file systems. With the exception of chargeback, these are all relatively new technologies and, in future surveys, the pendulum may swing in their favor.
ABOUT OUR SURVEY: Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions survey is conducted twice a year (in the spring and in the fall). Storage subscribers are contacted by email and invited to participate in the survey. For the current survey, there were a total of 660 respondents. They're asked if they have purchasing authority in four areas: disk subsystems (595 respondents), storage networking (461), backup and disaster recovery (445), and storage management (334). Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey.
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