Enterprise Strategy Group

ESG Research Brief: European Enterprise IT Embraces Emerging Data Center Technologies and Best Practices
7/18/2008

Enterprise-class European and North American IT management teams share similar profiles with regard to the infrastructure they support and the major business and IT initiatives that shape their IT management strategies. Yet, European IT teams lead North America when it comes to deploying emerging technologies, such as Web 2.0 and SOA, and are far ahead in making production use of ITIL best practices. European organizations have largely bought into the value of ITIL to help them manage complex IT environments, leading to increased levels of IT effectiveness and business/IT alignment, while North American decision makers still struggle to see the ROI from best practices frameworks.

Pillar Data’s Application Aware Storage
2/5/2008

Pillar Data Systems has spent a great deal of time and money designing a storage architecture that can mesh with the specific needs of varying applications—and is now set to unveil the first proof points.

ESG Lab Validation Report: NetBackup PureDisk from Symantec - Efficient, Storage-Optimized Data Protection
6/10/2008

A growing number of organizations are deploying disk to disk backup and data de-duplication technologies to improve the speed and reliability of their backup and disaster recovery operations. This ESG Lab Validation Report examines Symantec’s family of backup and recovery solutions that combine the power of the PureDisk global data de-duplication engine with industry-leading NetBackup backup and recovery software to improve the speed and reliability of disk-based data protection while reducing the cost of disk capacity and network bandwidth.

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Steve's IT Rants
My Mother and Disaster Recovery

Insecure about Security
Is Full-Disk Encryption (FDE) A Commodity?

IT BULLETins
Ode to Wimbledon

Liquefying IT
Apple iPhone 3G as an End Point Virtualization Platform

Mark My Words
Going with the flow

ESG Named One Of World's Top Ten Global Analyst Firms

ESG was recently named one of the world’s top ten analyst firms by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR).

ESG was ranked ninth globally among all IT analyst firms and fourth among North American-focused firms in IIAR’s 2008 “Analyst Firm of the Year” list. ESG also secured the seventh spot on IIAR’s list of “Most Important Analyst Firm of the Year.”

Senior Analyst Brian Babineau was selected as one of the top ten global industry analysts of the year from approximately 200 nominees.

Click the link to learn more.

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7/2/2008 - Now Available: ESG Research Explores Medium-Size Organizations' Server and Storage Spending

ESG recently conducted an in-depth survey of 546 IT decision makers at North American medium-size businesses. According to ESG's new research report, Medium-Size Business Server & Storage Priorities, business factors having the greatest influence on medium-size organizations' server and storage spending over the next 24 months, include using IT to improve and optimize business processes (43%), reducing the overall cost of doing business (42%), and addressing corporate security and risk management concerns (39%).

Click on the links below to learn more about the contents and findings of this exciting and timely research publication.

Click here to view full-size chart.

Links
Click here to view "Medium-Size Business Server & Storage Priorities" Executive Summary.
Click here to learn more about the report.

Briefs:

	7/16/2008: Atempo Expands into E-mail Archiving : Atempo is making significant moves in the archive arena. First, it announced its Atempo Data Archive offering, and now the company is bringing Atempo Digital Archive for Messages to market. An established backup solution provider, Atempo is reinforcing the belief that backup and archive, though separate processes, offer a great deal of value when deployed together. Any good information management and protection strategy should incorporate both processes—Atempo is making it easy for customers to do so without engaging multiple vendors.

	7/16/2008: Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ CentricStor FS : Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ recently-announced CentricStor FS is a high-end file-centric storage device that allows users to scale at a very granular level to meet the capacity, availability and performance requirements driven by file server consolidation initiatives and Web 2.0 applications. Leveraging commodity components and advanced clustering capability, CentricStor FS is an easily managed, scalable file storage solution with a low entry price purpose built to deal with the new realities of file growth.

Research Reports:

	6/24/2008: Medium-Size Business Server & Storage Priorities: ESG recently surveyed 546 North American IT decision makers representing medium-size businesses—defined as organizations having between 100 and 999 employees. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be familiar with their organization’s server and storage infrastructure strategies at an organization-wide level (as opposed to a specific division, department, etc.). All participants were responsible for evaluating, purchasing and/or operating corporate server and storage resources. The goal of the study was to assess these customers’ server and storage priorities and purchasing strategies over the next 24 months. + Executive Summary

	3/19/2008: 2008 IT Service & Infrastructure Management Survey: ESG recently surveyed 602 enterprise and medium size business IT decision makers in North America, Western Europe and China regarding their organizations’ current and planned use of IT management automation technologies and service management best practices (e.g., ITIL, Six Sigma, ISO 20000, etc.) The goal of the study was to assess the types of business and IT operational impacts that occur when IT organizations deploy these tools and best practices in production environments. + Executive Summary

Lab Reports:

	6/10/2008: ESG Lab Validation Report: NetBackup PureDisk from Symantec - Efficient, Storage-Optimized Data Protection: A growing number of organizations are deploying disk to disk backup and data de-duplication technologies to improve the speed and reliability of their backup and disaster recovery operations. This ESG Lab Validation Report examines Symantec’s family of backup and recovery solutions that combine the power of the PureDisk global data de-duplication engine with industry-leading NetBackup backup and recovery software to improve the speed and reliability of disk-based data protection while reducing the cost of disk capacity and network bandwidth.

	5/19/2008: ESG Lab Validation Report: EMC Avamar - Revolutionizing Backup and Recovery: Rapid adoption of virtual server technology and the challenges associated with the backup and recovery of ever-growing stores of information located within branch and remote offices is causing a number of IT managers to reevaluate their data protection strategies. ESG evaluated Avamar examining a number of compelling capabilities that address these issues including Source-based Global Data Deduplication, how Avamar addresses VMWare backup challenges and EMC Networker integration. Also explored are scalability, high availability, reliability and security.

Free Reports & Publications:

	7/16/2008: Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ CentricStor FS : Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ recently-announced CentricStor FS is a high-end file-centric storage device that allows users to scale at a very granular level to meet the capacity, availability and performance requirements driven by file server consolidation initiatives and Web 2.0 applications. Leveraging commodity components and advanced clustering capability, CentricStor FS is an easily managed, scalable file storage solution with a low entry price purpose built to deal with the new realities of file growth.

	7/11/2008: Omneon – A Considered Route to Success?: Too much change or too broad a focus can be harmful to any company. Omneon is constructing an achievable route forward into an expanding market by adopting a step-by-step approach rather than leaping into the unknown. Its product offering has credibility from the broadcast market and great applicability to the growing multi-media storage market. Ultimately, the data management challenges of the two markets are common and Omneon is moving in a considered way to ensure that it can be a strong player in both.