10 Important Facts About Data Storage in the Enterprise

by Nathan Eddy

While 20 percent of organizations store a petabyte or more of data, a sizable 40 percent of organizations have less than 50 terabytes of data. However, the results are different for businesses with less than 100 employees: 29 percent of companies store a petabyte or more, and the percentage of organizations with less than 50TB has drops to just 22 percent.

Just 29 percent of organizations said they are taking advantage of affordable public cloud storage. This compares with tape storage, which is still being used by nearly 50 percent of the organizations that TwinStrata surveyed. Half the survey respondents who use the public cloud spend less than 10 percent of their IT budget on storage, compared with only one out of every three organizations using tape and spending so little.

The vast majority (81 percent) of organizations that use SANs or NAS devices keeps inactive data on them. Yet 68 percent of those who use tapes do so for inactive data, and a mere 38 percent of public cloud storage users keep inactive data there. Using SANs for low-priority data still remains the most common medium, with 65 percent of organizations with large amounts of passive data.

The survey found almost 60 percent of data-heavy organizations store more than half a petabyte of inactive data, and more than a quarter of these organizations are storing three-quarters of a petabyte that will rarely, if ever, be used again. The report projected that given the rate at which data creation overall has increased, that percentage is expected to grow.

Organizations that exclusively store inactive data on their SANs and NAS devices spend significantly more on storage as a proportion of their overall IT budget than those who use a mix of media or who do not store data on their SANs or NAS devices.

In fact, only 38 percent of exclusive SAN/NAS users claim that storage is less than a tenth of their overall IT expenditure, in sharp contrast with the nearly half (48 percent) of mixed media respondents, and a 15 point difference from those who do not rely on SANs and NAS for inactive data at all (53 percent).

Nearly two-thirds of organizations surveyed admitted to purchasing additional capacity on an annual or biannual basis, suggesting that despite the popularity of deleting data, the primary solution to capacity issues is purchasing more physical storage. Just 11 percent of organizations surveyed only buy additional storage every five or more years.

In addition to deleting data and buying more physical storage, 40 percent of organizations increase capacity by completely replacing their storage systems. However, system replacement is less frequent than capacity expansion, with 60 percent of organizations replacing their storage systems within five years.

Studies suggest that many organizations suffer from unauthorized cloud use, thanks to storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive. In these instances, the report warns individual employees are using the cloud to store their data, but without the security precautions of their organizations’ designated storage systems.

Although adding capacity and replacing systems will always be one of the primary concerns when dealing with data storage, by being proactive about creating long-term, data-specific solutions, organization can save time and money to better focus on the rest of their goals.