COPAN Systems has announced results from a new survey conducted to better understand how companies are managing and storing persistent data – the non-changing static data that makes up the majority of stored corporate data. With a respondent base of over 250 IT professionals at Fortune 1000 companies, government and academic institutions around the world, the survey indicates that IT departments are not managing their persistent data effectively and are not fully educated about the environmental and economical impact of their current storage decisions.

• 71 percent of companies are storing persistent data on either primary storage or a mix of primary and archival systems - an expensive, inefficient and environmentally wasteful method for storing static data.

• While most industry analysts estimate persistent data to be 70 percent or more of all corporate data, only 30 percent of the respondents estimated their persistent data to be that large, an indication that most companies do not understand how much persistent data is clogging their storage networks.

• 20 percent acknowledged they did not know how much persistent data currently resides on their systems.

“Storing persistent data that is infrequently accessed on primary storage systems is a huge waste both economic and environmental resources,” said Jay Gagne, Solutions Architect, COPAN Systems. “We have found that many companies don’t fully grasp the types of data they are storing and how to store it effectively. There is a great untapped opportunity for companies to leverage more cost effective storage strategies to help dramatically alleviate the pressures that persistent data is putting on data centers around the world.”