Backup is set to be the prime storage priority for 2008
Eran Farajun, Asigra

“In light of a recent survey by SearchStorage.com on storage managers, which cited backup as the prime storage priority for 2008 at 39.1%, I believe that 2008 is set to be a year when storage managers focus heavily on implementing additional features and applications to deal with mounting storage capacity issues, such as adding data de-duplication technologies to support remote and branch office backup.

“The survey also revealed that many storage managers (55%) are planning on making purchases in the server virtualization space, one that is quickly gaining traction, but they need to first of all recognize the cost and functional advantages of agentless backup solutions over license-based solutions in a virtual environment. Virtualized servers require additional licenses to be bought for license-based backup solutions, whereby customers are forced to pay a separate license fee for each virtual machine in use, even though the virtual machines are deployed on a single hardware server. Alternatively, agentless backup solutions allow for back up at the ESX level without installing software agents, which may otherwise disrupt the stability, as well as enabling a more granular data recovery from a server failure situation, rather than having to restore the entire VM, which would take much longer and significantly add to the costs for customers implementing a virtual solution.

“As backup is set to be the prime storage priority for 2008, I would advise storage managers to look from an holistic perspective when considering different vendor solutions, to ensure that they not only tick the boxes in applications that help to address storage capacity and DR issues, such as de-duplication and continuous data protection tools and features, but that they also tick the boxes in being compatible with all types of server environments and being able to do this cost-effectively, particularly with regards to virtual server environments.”