SEPATON Survey Shows Deduplication Key to Enterprise Disaster Recovery Planning

Disk-based backup only way to address explosive data growth and stringent disaster protection requirements on limited budget

MARLBOROUGH, MA — March 2, 2010 — SEPATON, Inc., the leader in enterprise-class disk-based data protection solutions, today announced the results of a survey of large enterprise companies with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect conducted in December 2009 - January 2010. Over 400 IT professionals across North America and Europe responded meeting SEPATON’s criteria. This high response underscores the top-of-mind nature and importance of data protection for enterprise data centers in the coming year.

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• Nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or decrease in 2010. Enterprises consider the need to improve disaster recovery and to protect data assets and to keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities. 

• A key focus of spending in 2010 will be on disaster recovery, data deduplication, VTL, and other disk-based technologies. Enterprises are investing in disk-based data protection technologies that reduce total cost of ownership while increasing the levels of protection and service they can provide. 

• Forty one percent cited insufficient budget to keep up with technology as the primary reason that their data protection falls short. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance. 

• Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-seven percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at more than twenty percent (compounded) per year. 

• Time and labor costs required to protect and manage data is significant. Forty-three percent of respondents need more than twenty-four hours to complete a full backup. Eleven percent needed more than twenty full time employees to manage their data protection. 

• While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, most do not expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies (VTL and disk-to-disk) as well as cloud and managed service providers (MSP) in 2010. 

• Disaster recovery is a key priority in the enterprise data center. Forty-six percent of respondents are not currently meeting their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and ROP) in a consistent manner. Seventy percent of respondents cited improving disaster recovery protection as their most important goal for 2010. 

• Companies want longer online data retention. Only twenty-six percent of respondents are retaining their data online for 120 days. However, forty percent would increase their online data retention to 120 days if implementing deduplication made longer retention cost-effective.