January 23, 2002—According to a survey released by Akara Corporation, business continuance ranks as the number one issue that will cause large enterprises to extend the storage of mission-critical data beyond their walls. This survey of enterprise IT executives, where 50% worked at companies with revenues in excess of $500 million, revealed a number of key storage networking trends.
Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed said that business continuance is “very important” in driving the extension of storage over metro and wide area networks. Likewise, the survey also found that there will be a dramatic shift toward networked storage architectures and storage transport protocols that can support cost-effective business continuance applications.
Ninety-seven percent said that Storage Area Networks (SAN) will be an “important” or “very important” storage architecture over the next five years. A SAN storage architecture, properly deployed over a metropolitan area network, can offer enterprises the added security of storing mission-critical data over distance without compromising the availability of that data.
Seventy-two percent of the companies surveyed said that they plan to increase their use of Fibre Channel for storage transport. When Fibre Channel is used in a SAN, businesses can benefit from its flexibility, scalability, low latency and guaranteed transport.
The survey data reflects the high level of attention being given to business continuance and storage management by IT executives, who are faced with managing an exponentially increasing amount of mission-critical data. Participating in the survey were approximately ninety IT executives from the financial services, manufacturing, retail and healthcare fields. The survey was conducted during Akara’s “Storage Turning Point” symposium series held in Boston, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York during October and November of 2001. For more information, contact Akara.
