Overland Storage White Paper Sample

Disk is becoming the new primary backup target in almost all organizations, regardless of size. Attracted by today’s 1 terabyte disk drive capacities, which have driven disk prices to as low as 40 cents per gigabyte, as well as faster backup and recovery speeds and higher success rates with both backup and recovery, it’s no wonder that small, midsize and enterprise organizations are now making the shift to disk. In fact, one analyst report projected that by 2011, 50 percent of all organizations will protect data using disk with more than 1,500 petabytes of data on disk in North America alone. And, that estimate may be conservative.

Already we see this trend alive and well among small organizations (i.e., those with less than 100 employees or with 0–10 terabytes of production data). It can be argued, however, that these organizations rarely or never backup their data to tape anyway and, if they did, the processes were poorly managed. So the idea of backing up data short- and long-term on disk makes sense from administrative, economic and technical viewpoints.

It is as we move into midsize and enterprise organizations that the question arises whether these organizations can cost-effectively keep all their backup data on disk long-term. New data reduction technologies, such as compression and deduplication, are making it more financially feasible to store more data on less disk space. But even with lower-cost disk drives, not only is the amount of data that these organizations need to protect increasing, these organizations are making more copies of production data that they need to protect and recover.