Poll: Disaster recovery tops storage priorities

Computerworld Singapore - SINGAPORE - Disaster recovery emerged as the top driver for storage deployment in a poll of 100 IT professionals by Computerworld Singapore.
Up to 38% of respondents had implemented disaster recovery measures such as data backup and recovery solutions, while 25% were planning to do so over the next 12 months.
Not surprisingly, these findings tallied with responses to business continuity planning. About 21% of respondents had put in place some business process contingency plans and 20% had plans to do so. In both scenarios, business continuity had the second highest number of responses after disaster recovery.
Other storage-related solutions captured in the poll included network storage security, storage management software, network attached storage and storage area networks.
Despite the prevailing cash crunch, about 84% of respondents said they expect to increase their storage expenditure this year, albeit at modest rates of less than 25% for most (58%).
This is not surprising, given that budget constraints emerged top among storage-related woes that administrators are currently facing (47% of respondents). This was followed by the management of the backup and restore process (29%), and application performance issues linked to storage (20%).
Many of these findings were reinforced in the responses to the question of storage priorities. "Reducing cost" was "very important" to topped this section, with 55% of respondents indicating that was "very important". This was followed by the need to develop better disaster recovery solutions (46%), and the need to improve manageability and flexibility of storage systems (45%).

Reprinted with permission from

Computerworld Singapore
This article was originally published by Computerworld Singapore. Story copyright 2006 Computerworld, Inc. All rights reserved.