Disk drive failure is top bugbear for IT pros

Losing 30 days of data has really cheesed off one firm

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 13th March 2001 17:04 GMT

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Hard drive crashes are the number one concern for systems administrators in charge of keeping storage systems up and running.

That's the conclusion of a survey of 900 IT professionals, 61 per cent of which rated hard-disk failure as their most pressing concern when it came to hard drive problems. Running out of disk drive space was cited as the second most important issue, and was rated as their top bug bear by 27 per cent of respondents to the survey.

The study, conducted by Survey.com for Executive Software, also reported that managers estimated their direct cost of a hard-drive failure at $15,000 per incident, a figure which doesn't include lost productivity and or the effects on sales while systems are down.

Executive Software reckons firms need to invest in better software tools, such as the kind it provides, that would warn users of disk crashes before their systems go titsup.com. To back this up it points to findings in the survey which suggest four in five IT professionals wanted technology that would warn them of impending disk failure.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we learned today that system errors at a major European directory firm had resulted in the failure of its RAID disks. This resulted in the loss of 30 days of data processing work, three days of application development effort - to say nothing of the loss of three weeks of email traffic.

Storage may be dull, but it's also pretty important... ®