Disaster recovery sends storage skywards

The exponential growth in storage needs is having a particularly profound effect on smaller and medium-sized companies, many of which have been forced to double or even triple their data capacities over the past year.

One of the primary drivers behind this rapid growth comes from heightened awareness of the importance of disaster recovery systems.

The currently unsettled international political climate, brought into sharp focus by the terrorist atrocities in New York, has served to push business continuity management - and the storage subsystems which underpin it - to the top of many corporate IT agendas.

According to John Sharp, chief executive of the Business Continuity Institute, organisations are doubling and even trebling their storage requirements by mirroring all their mission critical data across multiple back-up sites.

The trend, Sharp said, is for constant availability, rather that looking to recover IT systems in a given time from remote back-ups.

"We are moving away from disaster recovery to an availability situation. This means that you've got to have the storage in place to provide mirroring so that you can pick up a system immediately from a remote location," he explained.

"Especially in financial services and banking, but also in retail and other areas, firms cannot afford any downtime. They cannot lose revenue while systems are down, and they cannot lose the customers who will go elsewhere because the outage has given them a poor service."

This view was endorsed by Paul Eskriett, principal security and contingency advisor for the City of London, who observed that decreasing bandwidth costs allow companies of all sizes greater flexibility in terms of where they store back-up data.

"A number of companies have recently been reviewing data storage and its role in business continuity planning. The biggest change is coming in terms of where companies put their data," he told vnunet.com.

"Data storage can be wherever companies want to put it; it's just a question of linking it through. So some companies have been looking at moving data storage further away from their main sites, but this does not mean that their contingency sites need to be as far away as the data."

According to the Storage Networking Industry Association Europe (SNIA-E), this explosive growth in storage requirements shows no sign of abating.

More than 30 per cent of respondents to the industry body's annual storage audit found that their storage requirements had grown by 100 per cent or more in the previous 12 months. A staggering nine per cent had seen growth of more than 200 per cent.

The key data types that are pushing demand in storage growth are databases (73 per cent) and email (63 per cent).

A spokesman for the SNIA-E commented: "The continuing explosion of information from databases and email shows no sign of abating in the near future. IT directors are facing a constant battle to contain and effectively manage this information.

"While new operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, may reduce the volume of data by consolidating information via single sign-in options and improved database management tools, this is in an early adoption phase.

"So long as the growth in business conducted via email continues, and databases offer increasingly improved functionality, then networked storage is an optimum solution to keep track of data."