Symantec has just published the results of
its 2009 Disaster Recovery survey, which the firm says it will use to
guide its product plans (as well as promote its current products, of
course).
"We're looking at challenges customers are facing, and trying to
build these requirements into our products. So applications can be up
and running as soon as possible," said Dan Lamorena, Senior Manager,
High Availability and Disaster Recovery, Symantec. Symantec plays in
this market with the backup, recover, and high availability solutions
it got with its purchase of Veritas in 2005.
Not surprisingly, the survey reflects the economic pressures we are
all under, with respondents hesitant to commit to spending money on
improving their disaster recovery technology. At the same time, they're
very concerned about business disruption caused by testing a disaster
recovery setup.
Some 40% claimed that DR testing has a negative impact on customers,
up from 32% in 2008. Along the same lines, 27% said DR testing hurts
revenue, up from 21% in 2008. I'm quoting the global survey figures
(the results from North American IT folks were slightly less dismal).
This is one area where Symantec says it can help, with techniques for
running DR testing against a clone of the production environment rather
than the production environment itself.
Another thing I thought was interesting was the impact of
virtualization. One of the claimed advantages of virtualization is that
a VM image is potentially a lot easier to backup, restore, or relocate
than a physical server. But Lamorena says virtualization is also
introducing complications and forcing organizations to rethink their
disaster recovery plans, a factor cited by 64% of respondents.
"Part of it is that not that many mission critical applications are
virtualized yet," Lamora says. "I do think you can recover faster if
you can recreate virtual servers. But there are some real challenges
around backup and storage." Only 36% of companies participating in the
survey said they are backing up their virtual environments, according
to Symantec.
One obstacle is that backing up complete VM images results in a lot
of redundancy from all the duplicate copies of the operating system
files and data. This is where smart application of de-duplication
technologies can be part of the answer, so that you're not storing 100
copies of the same version of every Windows DLL when you back up 100 virtual instances from
your server farm.
The survey was conducted by Applied Research in late May and early June, and the full results are available here:
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/media/2009_disaster_report.pdf
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