Black"s company has dozens of data centers and anywhere from four to seven petabytes of data to manage. With so much data, storage administrators are struggling to stay on top of backups.

"We"re trying to find something that helps us meet our backup windows," Black said. "That"s one of the biggest hurdles right now. It"s one we"re researching."

Like many users at the conference, Black is testing disk-to-disk backup technologies, such as virtual tape libraries that emulate real tape libraries to application servers but allow data to be saved to disk before transferring it off-line to tape for archival.

Cliff Dutton, chief technology officer at Ibis Consulting Inc. in Providence, R.I., said he is also concerned with the ability to track data, especially in a crisis. Ibis manages 200TB of network-attached storage as part of its electronic data discovery business.

He currently does not replicate data to an off-site facility because data restoration must be "almost instantaneous."

"If something is down for even a few minutes, it"s a horrible problem for us. We"re under deadline regulatory requirements from the SEC or a judge," Dutton said. "We can"t have a second tier [of data] replication with a slow restore. It would have to be a process that we could process that data in live, real time."