A plethora of storage vendors are expected to announce this week at Storage Networking World in Orlando software and hardware that lets IT managers better protect and back up data on Fibre Channel and IP storage-area networks.

Protecting data has become a priority because of the time it takes to back up and recover that data. Horison Information Technologies estimates that as much as 65% of storage management time is spent on backup and recovery.

And users back up that claim.

"We spend two to three hours a day maintaining the back-up system - checking logs, dealing with errors, restarting failed backups - with less time doing data recovery," says Dennis Lee, senior network engineer at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Kevin Calk, vice president of IT for eCom PPO, a Dallas healthcare provider organization, says: "Our back-up window was already pushing into our workday. Backup is supposed to be an automated process, but we got to the point where I had my staff giving me a weekly update of the success or failure of the backups."

Calk is beta-testing the back-up and replication capability - Backup Advantage - that Stonefly  is introducing. Stonefly's new features allow local mirroring and remote replication of data for business continuity. Backup Advantage costs $29,800.

Other announcements expected at Storage Networking World include:

• Intransa plans to introduce a midrange iSCSI storage appliance, which includes automatic failover capability. The iSCSI-based IP5500 SAN appliance can be used not only for data recovery but also data mining or warehousing applications. The IP5500 has as much as 24T bytes of storage and starts at $60,000.

• Isilon is expected to announce a new version of its file system that lets disk images be rebuilt automatically if a disk in the cluster fails. Called Flexprotect-AP, the software rebuilds 250G-byte drives in less than an hour and protects against data loss even in the event of multiple disk failures, the company says. Flexprotect-AP is included with Isilon's IQ 1400 and 2250 clusters, which start at about $50,000.

• Revivio is expected to announce a new back-up and recovery appliance, the CPS 1200, which connects to high-end storage arrays from EMC, HP or IBM. Revivio's CPS 1200 differs from traditional backup and recovery in that all changes are recorded as they are written to disk. If a failure occurs, data can be retrieved from the closest minute, rather than from when the last scheduled full or incremental backup occurred. The CPS 1200 starts at $250,000.