Arthur Cole: Disaster Recovery Lacking in Virtual Environments

Enterprises pursuing virtual strategies seem to be placing themselves at greater risk of substantial data loss even as the virtual technology they are deploying simplifies and reduces the cost of disaster recovery (DR).

That’s the contradictory take-away from a new survey from Symantec on the state of backup and recovery capabilities in virtual environments. The survey, conducted by Applied Research, showed that nearly half of enterprise data stored on virtual systems is rarely backed up and fully 60 percent of virtualized servers do not figure into DR plans – a one-third gain over 2009. And this is despite the fact that DR now comprises more than a quarter of annual IT budgets.

As we pointed out a few weeks ago, there certainly is no shortage of disaster recovery systems tailored to virtual environments. In fact, virtualization makes recovery that much easier by increasing the portability of both data and operating systems across various hardware platforms. In an age when entire data centers can be hosted in the cloud, this inability or unwillingness to ensure backup of virtual environments is puzzling. As solutions provider CSS points out in a recent blog, the cloud provides a much more flexible DR framework than a traditional backup facility at a substantially lower price point.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.