Disaster recovery tops Expo agenda

IT staff attending this week's Storage Expo are plagued by familiar problems of reliability, capacity and compliance.

Disaster recovery is the number-one concern for most visitors to this week’s Storage Expo show in London, according to research, with storage service providers and consultants queuing up to help enterprise IT managers address the problem.

A new survey by BridgeHead Software questioned 350 executives, IT managers, network administrators and engineers from the US and the UK. When asked which factors were driving data archiving requirements, 70 percent cited disaster recovery/business continuity, 62 percent said data growth and 58 percent said regulatory compliance.

In the UK, tape is still used for archiving by 72 percent of respondents. In the US, however, the use of tape as a storage medium is actually growing, with a 16 percent increase recorded over the previous BridgeHead survey in 2005.

BridgeHead senior vice-president of corporate marketing, Patrick Dowling, believes this could be an indication that firms are using more tape to aid disaster recovery.

“On the one hand it could be that firms are extending tape backups as a way of doing archiving; on the other, people may be looking to protect data by keeping multiple copies on multiple formats and storing them in recovery centres,” he said.

Elsewhere, disaster recovery service provider Iron Mountain has tailored its managed Connected Backup/PC and LiveVault server backup offerings by adding extra support options.

Connected Backup/PC intalls a 4MB software client on every desktop and laptop PC that sends incremental changes to Iron Mountain’s datacentre once a day, while LiveVault does the same for servers.

“That [support] menu could include anything from a fully outsourced datacentre service where Iron Mountain owns the hardware and users access it securely over the internet, all the way down to a remote managed application service hosted on the customer network,” said Iron Mountain’s Nick Cater.