Main conclusions:
• 68% of IT directors think that backup and recovery tools that they use will become less effective in the future as the amount of data and servers in their organization grows.
• Recovery of virtual server is not faster that of the physical one: 5 and 6 hours, respectively. There is a tendency towards decrease of recovery speed: in 2011 the recovery took 4 and 5 hours.
• Every downtime hour costs $324,793 on average. It means that downtime per incident costs $1,6 mln. on average.
• Recovery of separate files and enclosures can take even more time. For example, the recovery of emails takes 14 hours on average.
• Regardless of time consumed, companies have problems with data recovery in more than 1 out of 6 cases.
• 88% of IT directors face difficulties with backup and recovery. For 84% the system is complicated, and 87% of respondents think that the system they use is too expensive. This points to the fact that data protection and recovery remain a challenging endeavour.
• 58% of IT directors are planning to replace virtual environment backup tools by 2014.
“Fears of IT directors seem to be justified at first sight: despite a possibility of a faster and more effective data protection process offered by virtualization as well as advantages available owing to modern tools, the recovery time has increased as compared with 2011. This clear loss happens for two reasons. Firstly, virtual infrastructure constantly expands: nowadays a virtual environment became the basis of the majority of IT infrastructures and it tends to grow. Secondly, enterprises don’t update their data protection systems to the necessary level. For example, the majority of enterprises still use special agents for backup and recovery. Such solution fits physical environment but is not at all necessary and justified for virtual infrastructure. As long as enterprises will look at virtualization only from the perspective of physical environment, they will not be able to utilize its full potential”— thinks Ratmir Timashev, President and executive director Veeam.
At present, number of virtual servers in enterprises is 51%, at the same time it is expected that by 2014 then umber would reach 63%. IT directors are not blind, and they see problems posed by growing virtual infrastructure.
88% of CIOs experience capability-related challenges with backup and recovery, 84% related with complexity and 87% with cost. 77% of enterprises that use special agents for backup, experience difficulties in using data backup and recovery technology. It refers to: too complicated management (43%), frequent backup errors (32%), recovery (28%), technology costs (20%) and agents that slowdown server’s performance (18%).
One of the signs that companies begin to realize problems is the fact that 58% of respondents are planning to replace their virtual server backup tools by 2014. The driving force of this was the financial implication. 51% of respondents will replace tools with purpose of reducing TCO (total cost for organization) and 42% want to reduce their software and hardware costs. Main reasons behind the replacement are complexity (47%), inability to ensure high RTO (32%) and RPO (24%) indicators.
“Virtualization technology reaches its turning point – says Ratmit Timashev. – Companies have now realized the advantages this technology can bring along. And now they begin to realize the real capacity of the technology, if managed properly. Modern data protection tools designed specifically to suit virtualization purposes, can uncover this potential as well as eliminate many existing problems, complexities and cost-related issues faced by IT departments. For example, reduction of cost of processes like replication, allows companies to protect vital infrastructure objects even more against server downtime and ultimately save millions of dollars. Data recovery virtualization will allow companies to test more backups, whereas today only 7% are tested. The most important thing is that using appropriate tools will help IT directors to recover a separate file or full server for less than 5 hours,” — explains Ratmir Timashev.
About the survey:
Vanson Bourne, an independent marketing agency specializing on market research, conducted an internet poll during November-December 2012 of 500 IT directors from the USA, Great Britain, Germany and France with total employed staff exceeding 1000. You can download full text from www.veeam.com/survey.