Backup consumes big chunks of budgets, study shows

TheInfoPro data points to drain on IT storage spending, moves to virtual tape.

The wild expansion of data requiring replication and protection is a key challenge for IT, according to a recent biannual storage study by TheInfoPro, an IT market research company.

Administrators are charged with data protection, provisioning, user support, compliance and transparent backup, to name a few.

"We do thousands of backups, and our greatest challenge is keeping up with them, making sure they will run. It is a lot of work," says one member of the TIPNetwork, TheInfoPro's panel of enterprise users.

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The wild expansion of data requiring replication and protection is a key challenge for IT, according to a recent biannual storage study by TheInfoPro, an IT market research company.

Administrators are charged with data protection, provisioning, user support, compliance and transparent backup, to name a few.

"We do thousands of backups, and our greatest challenge is keeping up with them, making sure they will run. It is a lot of work," says one member of the TIPNetwork, TheInfoPro's panel of enterprise users.

The study found nearly 10% of companies with backup systems spend more than $5 million annually on backup hardware, and about 9% of companies with backup systems spend at least $1 million on backup software. That can be a real drain on overall storage budgets.

To cope with such explosive growth, storage professionals are turning to virtual tape technology. According to TheInfoPro research, 39% of storage pros intend to spend more money on virtual tape libraries (VTL) in 2006 than they did in 2005.

For any manager who has felt the urge to break robotic arms or who has plucked out a new bald spot waiting for the tape to recover a lost piece of data, VTL should prove helpful.

Stevenson is managing director of TheInfoPro. He can be reached at rstevenson@theinfo pro.net. Tallman is a research associate at TheInfoPro. He can be reached at jtallman@theinfo pro.net.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.