SEPATON Data Protection Index finds managing data centre ‘sprawl’ and improving backup efficiency key concerns

SEPATON, the only company in the world that delivers disk-based data protection solutions specifically designed for large enterprises, today announced the results of the SEPATON Data Protection Index, an annual survey of large enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect. The survey was conducted in April 2012 and elicited responses from 93 IT professionals across a wide range of vertical industries in both Europe and North America.

The objective of the SEPATON Data Protection Index was to understand some of the data protection issues and concerns facing today’s large enterprises with big backup environments and the trends that matter most to enterprise managers.

Key findings include:
• Enterprises continue to face the challenges of protecting enormous data volumes and handling rapid data growth. Data growth continues unabated with fifty percent of respondents reporting their data was growing from twenty to seventy percent annually while an additional twenty percent reported even higher annual growth rates
• Data centres now face a growing challenge of ‘sprawl’ as they add more and more systems to handle data growth. Fifty percent characterise their environments as having “moderate” or “severe” sprawl requiring them to routinely add data protection systems to scale performance or capacity
• Increasing capacity and performance of data protection systems are the top priorities for the coming months. Fast growing data volumes and data centre sprawl are driving a need for scalable high performance
• Improving efficiency of the big backup environment also a key priority. Data centres need a way to ensure they are getting the most value from their backup environment. Deduplication is either not being used at all on databases (thirty-eight percent) or not seen as adequately controlling data growth and capacity costs associated with databases (twenty-six percent) in large enterprises

“As the survey report reveals, respondents reported a marked increase in annual data growth. Nearly one quarter of respondents reported twenty-five percent higher growth rate compared to last year,” said Joe Forgione, senior vice president, product operations and business development, SEPATON.

“One of the consequences of this accelerating data growth is data centre ‘sprawl’ as enterprise IT departments with non-scalable data protection systems are forced to add new systems to scale capacity or performance. We expect an increase in the need to replace siloed systems with scalable data protection platforms and better deduplication solutions to address data capacity growth.”

For more details, download the full survey report at http://go.sepaton.com/2012SurveyResultsVol1.html