1. Windows Server 2008 Drives Upgrade, Compatibility Efforts: Microsoft’s long-awaited Windows OS was made available to users in early 2008 with new features for virtualisation, security, and performance, but also creating the typical rush among vendors to offer compatible products for backup and recovery. Furthermore, the significant upgrade process created even more need for backup as users faced possible data loss during the upgrade.
With upgrades as significant as Windows Server 2008, most organisations require a sizable learning curve to understand the new system and implement it into the IT environment. During the upgrade process, they often choose to revamp a number of other tech processes, such as backup. Symantec supports the new Windows Server 2008 with Backup Exec, NetBackup, Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Volume Replicator.
2. Microsoft Hyper-V Creates Competition: Microsoft’s virtualisation hypervisor, Hyper-V, ratcheted up the competition in the market with its open approach (as opposed to VMware’s more proprietary offering). As users continue to move virtualisation into production, Symantec believes they will discover that traditional approaches (such as VMware) will limit the ability to maximise assets and reap the benefits of server virtualisation.
Organisations will continue to adopt ‘open’ hypervisors like Hyper-V as they will discover that traditional approaches (such as VMware) will limit the ability to maximise assets and reap the benefits of server virtualisation. Similar offerings are expected from a number of large vendors in 2009. Hyper-V allows virtualisation to move into the SMB market. As competition increases in 2009, organisations will need to manage and protect virtual and physical machines together.
3. Complexity Drives Backup Redesign Projects: According to a recent study by the InfoPro, backup redesign was the top storage initiative for data center managers in 2008 and beyond, followed by tiered storage, consolidation, and virtualisation adoption. Backup design projects are driven by increasing complexity across the IT infrastructure, a proliferation of point tools to manage backup, and multiple management interfaces. Backup Redesign projects are also driven by a need for support for virtual environments.
Organisations of all sizes are challenged with managing their disk backup, storage growth, and improving the speed and ease of recovery of application data, leading to increased complexity for IT administrators.
4. Backup Moves to Service Model – Limitations in IT resources drove some end users to use SaaS models for some technologies, such as backup, reducing the burden of dealing with purchasing, configuring, and maintaining and on-premises solution.
SaaS is described as one of the most impactful trends in software with a current estimated market size of $5.71 billion (in 2007) reaching $16.98 billion by 2012, representing 24.4 percent CAGR according to IDC. According to a recent Symantec survey:
- 92 percent of SMBs surveyed have deployed some form of data backup technology, yet 50 percent of those respondents have lost data
- About 33 percent of companies that lost data said they have lost sales or a customer as a result
- About 25 percent of companies that lost data report the loss had caused severe disruptions to the company
- About 25 percent of SMBs do not conduct backups of PCs or Servers
5. Data Center Energy Crisis – According to McKinsey, the total estimated energy bill for data centers in 2010 will be $11.5 billion, up from 8.6 billion in 2007. In 2008, energy costs across all sectors drove IT to look at the cost savings and efficiencies they can achieve through ‘green’ data center solutions.
Energy costs in a typical data center double every five years. Not only are many corporations implementing a Green IT strategy to do their part to address environmental concerns, many are also discovering the cost savings they can achieve by addressing spiraling utility costs, the data center power shortage, and the evermore heat-generating equipment. The current focus on global warming issues and increasing energy costs may lead to government regulations and laws that may force the use of Green technologies.
6. Disaster Recovery Testing Still Lacking: Despite making improvements in disaster recovery planning efforts in 2008, organisations are still coming up short when testing those plans. According to Symantec’s 2008 Disaster Recovery result, respondents indicated that 30 percent of tests fail to meet recovery time objectives, with top reasons for failure including human error and technology.
According to Symantec’s recent DR survey:
- Nearly one-third of organisations reported they have had to implement part of their DR plan. However, in the past year there was a significant decrease in executive involvement on DR committees
- One-third of respondents indicate testing will impact their customers, and one-fifth admit such testing could negatively affect their organisation’s sales and revenue
- Respondents reported the top reasons why their tests failed include: human error (35 percent); technology failure (29 percent); insufficient IT infrastructure (25 percent); out-of-date plans (24 percent) and inappropriate processes (23 percent)
7. Thin Provisioning for Reclaiming Storage: As storage resources become scarce, users are turning to technologies like thin provisioning to make better use of existing storage. Thin provisioning gives organisations the ability to deploy ‘thin’ storage, reclaiming storage during online migrations and driving operational efficiency. The technology lets users allocate space to servers on a just-enough and just-in-time basis in order to make better use of existing resources.
Thin provisioning is a storage array-based technology to efficiently provision storage on demand to applications and maximise storage utilisation. However, realising the full benefit of thin provisioned storage is challenging as many file systems do not use storage capacity efficiently and existing applications cannot be intelligently migrated from traditional storage arrays into thin provisioned arrays. Without intelligent file system and storage integration, there is no way to return excess storage capacity to the storage pool over time, resulting in inefficient use of storage assets. Until today, these limitations have slowed the deployment of thin provisioned storage in the enterprise.
8. Economy Impacts IT Priorities: As IT budgets are tightened due to the current economic conditions, many organisations are shifting their focus to finding more efficient technologies that manage complexity while reducing resources. There is some speculation that implementing new and innovative technologies will be put on the back burner in favor of those that help IT make better use of resources.
Data volumes are doubling every two years, while storage utilisation rates hover around 33 percent. Despite smaller IT budgets, administrators will be forced to continue to deploy solutions to manage and protect data.
9. Protecting and Managing Virtual Machines Comes Together: According to IDC’s first Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualisation Tracker, virtualisation technologies have matured significantly over the past year. In fact, virtualisation license shipments for the second quarter of 2008 increased 53 percent over the prior quarter and were up 72 percent over the same quarter last year. IT professionals recognise that successful virtualisation initiatives utilise tools that manage both physical AND virtual machines together. A recent Symantec survey held at this year’s VMWorld showed that end users are spending significant time and resources managing storage and HA/DR in virtual environments.
- Greater visibility, reporting and monitoring remain major challenges, and almost all respondents are not satisfied with current storage management solutions for virtual servers
- 41% of respondents spend at least 21 percent of their time managing storage in a virtual server environment; 13% spend at least half their time each week managing storage
- Only 10% of respondents indicated that their current storage management software meets most of their online storage management needs for virtual environments