The combination of growing data stores, along with tightened rules for retaining and retrieving electronic data, have prompted small and mid-sized companies to focus on shoring up their data archiving technology.But not just any technology will do, according to a new study from Permabit Technology Corp., a data archiving vendor based in Cambridge, Mass. A survey of 137 IT professionals revealed that cost and reliability were key.
The survey found that prohibitively high costs actually prevent some companies from implementing an archiving solution. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed are paying $25 to $40 or more per gigabyte for primary storage. Perhaps as a result, 45% of companies surveyed do not yet have an archive strategy in place, despite the fact that about 25% of the companies surveyed are managing 100TB of data or more.
Of those considering data archiving tools, almost 40% consider reliability the top criterion. Eighty percent consider the ability to search data an important consideration; 42% consider the difficulty in conducting searches to be the chief complaint with their current archiving solution. In addition, nearly half of respondents want to move data from primary storage to secondary disk storage.
The study also found that 60% of companies have more than 40% static data; for one-third of respondents, 40 to 60% of primary data store is static, and 8% have 80% or more static data.
