History 2003: 29% of European Storage Users Consider Adopting Virtualization in Next 6 Months

New research from the SNIA Europe shows that interest and adoption of storage virtualization looks set to take off, with 29% of users considering virtualization within the next 6 months.

Responses were obtained from 100 respondents representing storage professionals from end-user organizations throughout Europe and were collected from September 2002 to January 2003.

Many organizations are favoring an approach that uses a combination of NAS, SAN and DAS storage topologies. The majority of those questioned are favoring a combined approach to consolidation, with 42% of respondents planning to consolidate around NAS and SAN combined. 27% use both SAN and DAS, indicating that 35% use DAS alone. 30% are planning to only use SAN to attain one of their key aims during the coming year. 11% are planning to consolidate around NAS systems over the coming year.

A real growth area is iSCSI, currently only used by 4% of respondents, but estimated to be utilized by 25% of respondents within the next 12 months, according to the report. Whilst 25% will not be abandoning FC but using the 2 as complementary topologies.

DR and backup are the biggest technology concerns for end user respondents.

Best practice seems to be patchily adhered to, with less than half of those questioned testing and reviewing backup and restore practices every 2 months or less. 12% admit to not having a backup and restore procedure in place. DR is of primary concern to 57% of those that participated. 24% do not have a DR plan in place, although almost half feel that their colleagues and employees would know what to do in a disaster situation.

That said, almost a third (32%) of those questioned do make the effort to reassess and test their DR plan annually, while 20% make the effort to test procedures at least every 6 months.

Analyst house Gartner reports that up to 2 in every 5 data outages of mission critical data are caused by user error, not by technology malfunctions. That still leaves 60% of outages down to technology and indicates how vital a DR plan and a storage network is for backup and restoration.

As a result, it is hardly surprising that almost half of respondents are happy to use a storage service provider for disaster DR and 41 % for backup. Only 24% are happy to trust their online data to an SSP.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 183 on April 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.