Disaster recovery finds prominence

If there's one trend highlighted in the 2003 InfoWorld Storage Survey that everyone should take to heart, it is this: Business continuity, taking adequate measures to recover storage equipment from a disaster, has become part of a CTO's daily life and is no longer an afterthought or a placebo to pacify questioning auditors.

Although not all survey respondents are flying the disaster recovery flag, an overwhelming majority — nine out of 10 — has already cemented a disaster recovery plan for storage equipment or will have one in place within the year. These IT leaders are reacting to the ubiquitous threat of political terrorism, which joins the ranks of an already exceedingly long list of dangers including natural disasters, utility grid failures, catastrophic accidents, and human errors.

As the centerpiece of any business continuity plan, protecting storage equipment and company data from disruption requires a thoughtful blending of storage administration, risk assessment, and data protection activities. Survey respondents are tuned into that nugget of wisdom — 60 percent of the IT leaders we polled are involved in both defining disaster recovery procedures and purchasing storage solutions.

It may be stating the obvious, but the most effective way to preserve critical company data is to create copies, either online or on backup media, in case the original becomes corrupted or unavailable; this implies a need to stock up on additional storage devices to host those replicas. As a result, developing proper backup and disaster recovery strategies is the driving factor for new storage acquisitions among survey respondents, with backup projects ranking first at 69 percent of respondents and disaster recovery third at 57 percent (the latter is slightly behind the voracious requirements of hosting e-mail databases). A speedy data recovery is essential to getting your company quickly back in business after a failure. Also, if your backup copies are spread across different media formats, rebuilding the online databases can be more time-consuming and complicated.

When it comes to the media that respondents are using or planning to use for their backup chores, they prefer established formats that offer more capacity and performance. Quantum DLT (digital linear tape) and Super–DLT cartridges are used by 58 percent of respondents, who seem to appreciate the performance, capacity, and backward-compatibility of that line of tape drives. Moving down the food chain to more compact media, 27 percent of respondents has deployed 4mm tapes and a good 20 percent use the 8mm Sony AIT (advanced intelligent tape). Only a small percentage of respondents has chosen the LTO (linear tape open) or other tape technologies. But the real scoop is that a whopping 37 percent, the second largest group, has already deployed some form of online backup using disk drives rather than cartridges as media, and 24 percent plan to deploy a similar disk-based backup solution within the year.