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By a wide margin, respondents rated completing backups within defined windows as the most important result to achieve at their company, followed by meeting service-level agreements for moving tape copies off-site. Respondents also ranked these two results as the most important in 2006. Despite the increased adoption of disk, firms still struggle with the essential objectives of backup, completing backups, and transporting the data off-site for disaster recovery purposes. This is mostly likely due to the fact that capacities have increased dramatically in one year. From 2006 to 2007, the average capacity increased from approximately 38 terabytes (TB) to 88 TB (see Table 1). This capacity increase far exceeded respondents’ expected growth rates in 2006. As the volume of data that firms must protect increases, all focus is on completing backups within the allotted window and firms have little additional time and resources to determine how they can optimize the backup environment with advanced techniques and technologies.
Asia Pacific saw its capacity increase by 94%. In 2006, respondents from Asia Pacific had only anticipated a capacity increase of 18%. Clearly, these respondents had underestimated capacity growth in their environment. This year, respondents expect a 19% increase. It’s not unreasonable to assume that this is also a gross underestimation of future capacity requirements.
In the current study, Forrester asked respondents to break down their capacity by file, email, and database applications. File and email capacity and expected growth exceed that of database applications (see Table 2). This is consistent across geographic region and company size. This isn’t surprising, as email is the primary method of corporate communication and the backbone of a unified communication strategy, and firms consider it to be mission-critical; there is an avalanche of files due to the ongoing digitization of content such as multimedia files (graphics, photos, voice, video, etc.) and the creation of traditional office documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.).
File, email, and databases have different protection requirements. For example, it’s critical to have granular object-level recovery with files and email. Firms must be able to restore an individual file or email without restoring an entire file system or email store. Databases, on the other hand, do not typically require granular object-level recovery — restoring an individual tablespace, table, or row is dangerous and can corrupt the referential integrity of the database if not performed by someone without expert knowledge of the database structure. In the 2007 study, firms did not indicate a preference for a particular technology to protect a given data set, most likely because firms have not advanced their data protection operations to the point where they can take advantage of the distinctive capabilities of a particular technology (see Figure 1).
When asked to estimate their backup and recovery, 47% of respondents reported that their worldwide annual budget for backup and recovery was less than $500,000, and 21% reported that it respondents reported their backup and recovery budget was $500,000 or less. In the previous survey, 39% of respondents planned to increase spending by approximately 19%. In this year’s survey:
- 40% of respondents planned to increase spending during the next 12 months. The average increase in spending was 25%.
- 49% of respondents planned spending to remain the same during the next 12 months.
- Only 8% of respondents planned to decrease spending on backup and recovery during the next 12 months.
It’s clear that backup and recovery budgets are growing, but the results are still a relatively small budget when you consider that enterprises must protect more than 88 TB of data. This could be attributed to how many firms don’t have a budget specifically set aside for backup and recovery. IT often funds backup and recovery from multiple operational and capital budgets and can be difficult to estimate the total spend. Capacity optimization techniques such as deduplication will be critical to overcome the 3x capital acquisition cost of disk versus tape so that firms can expand the use of disk in data protection and to store more data on disk for longer periods of time. Expanded use of disk is critical to firms’ ability to complete backups during allotted windows and increase the speed of recovery. Generally speaking, backup to a disk target is 30% faster than tape, and recovery from disk can be as much as 90% faster than tape.
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