A series of extensive end-user surveys conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. reveal a major shift in the small and medium sized business IT operational plans for implementing high availability secure businesses.

The survey findings are analyzed in five reports:

ILM and Data Classification
ILM (information lifecycle management) deployment process encompasses a number of steps. Only 10 percent to 20 percent of the respondents believe having attained full implementation, with security scoring highest, and software lagging behind. SMBs dedicate up to 30 percent of their IT budget to deploy or improve upon ILM and data classification, viewing them as a solution to major deficiencies in their IT operation

Data Protection and CDP
Data protection has been the weakest link in the high-availability chain that conditions true business continuity. For the fourth consecutive year, a majority of respondents rank data protection highest among their storage management challenges. Snapshot techniques and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) come to the rescue, to meet critical business objectives that cannot be met in any other way. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the most common CDP application. The return on investment (ROI) is estimated to be less than two years by 61 percent of the respondents.

Backup , D2D and VTL
Faster data retrieval, reliability and ease of management are the major reasons for implementing VTL. Half of the respondents estimate their backup window and restore time need improvement, seeking seconds for RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for part of their data. Some experience three times less unsuccessful backups with disks. In spite of a tape business that holds strong, 55 percent estimate the timeframe for a tape-less operation to be less than 4 years, and 15 percent believe it will never happen.

iSCSI and SAN
37 percent of the 5,000 surveyed sites have implemented an iSCSI SAN, compared to less than 20 percent a year ago. This important market penetration involves all business tiers, challenging the early belief that iSCSI would more specifically attract small and medium sites. Twenty percent plan to purchase an iSCSI capability or extend its utilization in 2007. Concerns on security and performance that initially hindered iSCSI SAN implementations, no longer constitute an obstacle.100-Megabit IP networks gave way to 1 Gb in 2005 and 2006, and 10-Gb networks will prevail in 2007 and 2008.

NAS and NAS Virtualization
41 percent of sites with over one terabyte of disk storage have implemented NAS virtualization. The percentage of data stored on NAS continues to grow; sites storing over 30 percent of their data on NAS have grown to 44 percent from 29 percent in 2005, and 25 percent in 2004. Transparent scalability is cited as the major product selection criteria, followed by performance, and the ability to merge NAS units from different vendors.

The surveys addressed a random population of 35,000 sites. Over 4,000 reliable responses form the basis of preliminary findings covering storage configurations and implementation plans. For a selected population of over 100 IT sites, mostly SMBs, this report provides statistics on practices, ranks issues and needs, and analyzes trends, plans and preferred vendors

The five reports are now available. Peripheral Concepts, Inc. is a leading consulting firm specializing in storage and storage management. For more information go to www.periconcepts.com.