Financial services driving disk storage adoption

gallery

Research released today has revealed that financial institutions and financial services organisations are leading the way in migrating to disk-based backup storage from tape-based solutions.

The survey of 100 IT decision makers across a range of industries discovered a strong trend towards switching to disk-based data backup across most industry sectors, including manufacturing, retail, distribution, transport and utilities. But financial services firm respondents were leading the rest, with 64 per cent going for the speed and reliability of disk over traditional tape for backup purposes.

Survey sponsor and RAID storage vendor Infortrend said organisations are moving to disk storage for fast backup so they can avoid the limitations imposed by the ever-shrinking backup windows and ensure that, in case of disaster, the systems have backed up as much data as possible.

According to the poll by researcher Vanson Bourne, over half (56 per cent) of the respondents are choosing disk over tape for backup. But this trend is greater among organisations with more than 3,000 employees (63 per cent versus 49 per cent in the case of companies employing between 1,000 and 3,000 people). Organisations in the manufacturing space are the slowest adopters of disk-based backup - even so, more than half (52 per cent) still chose it over tape.

Rick Dudson, director of Sales at Infortrend Europe said: "The marked performance advantage of disk makes it the most appropriate solution for backup, offering the combination of speed, reliability and cost that tape does not offer. I believe this is one of the contributing factors to the marked increase in RAID solutions sales that we have witnessed in the past 12 months." Other industries mirrored the same trend according to the survey:

In addition, 54 per cent of respondents in the retail, distribution and transport industries chose disk over tape-based backup, while 56 per cent of respondents in other commercial markets, such as utilities, said that the advantages of disk prevail won out over those of tape alternatives.

Email to a friend

Print this page