UNCOVERED: FINANCIAL SERVICES ORGANISATIONS LEAD THE SWITCH FROM TAPE- TO DISK-BASED BACKUP
Independent Survey Commissioned by RAID Specialist Infortrend Unveils Technology Trend

Basingstoke, UK, 4^th July 2007 – RAID storage expert Infortrend® today unveiled the results of a survey carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne in the UK. Polling over 100 IT decision makers in the financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, transport and utilities markets, the study aimed to understand the advancement of the current move from tape- to disk-based backup. The strongest result emerging from the study is that although the switch to disk-based data backup is taking place in most industry sectors, it is the financial services market that is leading the way, with 64% of the respondents choosing the speed and reliability of disk over traditional tape for backup purposes.

Today organisations want their data backups to be extremely fast so they can avoid the limitations imposed by the ever-shrinking backup windows, and ensure that in case of disaster, the solution has backed up as much data as possible. According to the poll, whilst on average over half (56%) of the respondents are choosing disk over tape for backup, this trend is greater among organisations with more than 3,000 employees (63% versus 49% in the case of companies employing between 1,000 and 3,000 people). Organisations in the manufacturing space are the slowest adopters of disk based back-up; even so, more than half (52%) still chose it over tape.

"We hear it everyday from our customers; organisations have ever-increasing amounts of data to protect, data availability requirements are going up while backup windows are getting smaller and smaller," said Rick Dudson, Director of Sales at Infortrend Europe. "Therefore the marked performance advantage of disk makes it the most appropriate solution for backup, offering the combination of speed, reliability and cost that tape does not offer. I believe this is one of the contributing factors to the marked increase in RAID solutions sales that we have witnessed in the past 12 months."

Other industries mirrored the same trend according to the survey:

• 54% of respondents in the retail, distribution and transport industries chose disk- over tape-based backup;
• 56% of respondents in other commercial markets such as utilities said that the advantages of disk prevail over those offered by tape;

Infortrend enables organisations protect their data easily and cost-effectively with a range of best-in-class RAID solutions supporting all storage interfaces including SAS, SCSI, iSCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technologies allow users to spread (stripe) data across multiple disk drives to deliver fault tolerance, data availability and performance while appearing to the operating system as a single logical disk.

About Infortrend

Infortrend, the RAID storage expert, is a pioneer in cost-effective, high-performance networked storage. The company’s products include EonStor® storage systems and RAIDWatch® software for virtually all storage interfaces including SAS, SCSI, iSCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel.  For over a decade, Infortrend has provided reliable, fault-tolerant technology to prominent ODMs, distributors, and storage integrators worldwide. The company’s core competency includes feature-rich firmware and software, RAID controllers, and redundant and high availability RAID subsystems.  Founded in 1993, Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495.  For more information, visit www.infortrend.com.

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