SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 30, 2010  -- InformationWeek Analytics, the leading service for peer-based IT research and analysis, today announced the release of its latest research report; Storage Utilization: Data Dedupe Gains Ground-Albeit Slowly which explores the reasons companies are embracing less conventional storage technologies, and discusses trends in tiered storage and what's driving storage growth. The report digs deep into the research on data deduplication benefits and drawbacks, and assesses the need for the industry to remove the lingering mystery around the technology and set deduplication standards. The report author, Behzad Behtash, is an independent IT consultant who has served as CIO of Tetra Tech EM and VP of Systems for AIG Financial Products.

Research Summary:

As the volume of corporate data continues to grow, IT professionals keep investing in new storage utilization technologies. Compression still ranks No. 1, but newer technologies-deduplication as well as thin provisioning, massive array of idle disks (MAID) and others-continue to make headway in the market.

Findings: 

    * 61% of respondents now manage more than 10 TB of data for their organizations, up from 43% of those polled in 2009; 12% manage more than 500 TB of data, up from 8% last year.

    * The adoption rate for data deduplication technology hit 37% this year, compared with 24% in 2009; the percentage of respondents who said they're evaluating dedupe rose slightly, to 34% from 32%.

    * The percentage of respondents with no plans for immediate use of deduplication dropped from 34% to 22% in 2010, and only 7% of this year's respondents said they won't use dedupe-last year, 10% made that claim.

    * 65% of respondents told us they use compression technology for data storage, at least in limited production (that's about even with last year's 64%).

    * 27% of respondents use thin provisioning, up from 17% in 2009, and 25% are evaluating it, up from 20% a year ago.

    * 16% of people polled said they use MAID, up from 12% in 2009; however, 22% told us they definitely won't use MAID, an intriguing increase from last year's 17%.

For full access to the research data, members can download now: http://analytics.informationweek.com/abstract/24/4637/Storage-Server/research-2010-data-deduplication.html

"We probably shouldn't be surprised that these newer storage technologies are getting people's attention," says Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Analytics. "The sheer volume of data being churned out really demands new options in the storage market. And it's only going to get more intense with the ongoing push toward electronic medical records and other digital data."

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Source: UBM TechWeb