Economic conditions do not seem to be impacting the continued adoption of backup to disk technologies.  In a recent study we commissioned with Forrester Consulting, 90% of enterprises said they were already using backup to disk (56%) or planned to within the next 12 months (34%).  With data continuing to grow at double digit rates and backup windows continuing to shrink, new ways to cost effectively increase the speed of backups must be looked at.  Businesses are in fact achieving all kinds of benefits by augmenting their backup infrastructure with disk-based methods.  Here is the ranking of these adoption drivers by enterprise businesses:

1) Improve the speed of restores

2) Improve the success rates of backup and recovery

3) Improve the speed of backup

4) Eliminate the transport of physical tape

5) To get the benefit of advanced backup capabilities like virtual full for data reduction

6) Supporting the backup of virtual servers

7) Improving disaster recovery

Gaining efficiences as described above by successful companies can only help the botton line that's being squeezed by a difficult economy.  When deploying the disk hardware, these same customers rank as their most important concern the integration within the existing backup ecosystem.  Encryption, replication, hardware compression, scale and deduplication are among the other important considerations.

We are seeing customers have great success with this approach.  KPN, the largest telephone company in the Netherlands, could no longer complete backups in their available 16-hour window and required faster backup and restore of their critical Internet billing data.  KPN moved to a system of using HP Data Protector software to backup to disk, HP StorageWorks Virtual Library System.  This required no additional training for their staff and they can now complete backups in the available window.  The disk to disk system saved them time, money and effort and allowed them to then backup to tape without slowing down the network.

Look for more customer stories in upcoming blogs.