Virtualization causing organizations to rethink disaster recovery plans: Symantec 21 September, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> SaaS Trumps Social Media Mike Dubrall - Gilwell Group How to Evaluate Training William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Please join me at the Vendor Channel Management Summit in San Francisco Robert M. Cohen - Integrated mar.com Discount or Payment for Services? William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Goal Setting William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

According to the survey, virtualization has caused 55 percent of organizations worldwide to reevaluate their DR plans.

"Virtualization is so big that it is impacting companies enough that a real re-evaluation or redesign is warranted to make sure that the proper solutions are in place that are going to cover both physical and virtual worlds and no silo type solutions that are just managing point product," said Eric Schou, senior product manager with Symantec Corp.

However, he added that 54 percent of respondents said the challenge of backing up virtual systems was resource constraints.

"Companies have to do more with less and virtualization totally impacts both backup and DR," said Schou. As well, he added that while companies understand the value proposition of virtualization in terms of lowering the overall hardware infrastructure and lowering space, power and cooling costs, there are backup and DR challenges when it comes to virtualization.

"At the end of day when you are loading more and more applications inside of a physical machine, utilizing virtualization is going to get tougher and tougher to do successful backup," said Schou.

He explained that I/O doesn't virtualize well at all and the physical box is now saturated and there is no backup window. Shou stressed the importance of having the right products in place that spans both physical and virtual worlds.

According to the Symantec survey, 35 percent of virtual servers were not covered in organizations DR plans and only 37 percent of respondents reported they backed up more than 90 percent of their virtual systems.

Other findings included a significant decline in executive involvement in DR planning. In the 2007 DR survey, 55 percent of respondents said that their DR committees involved the CIO / CTO / IT director. In 2008, that number dropped to 33 percent worldwide.

Daniel Lamorena, senior project manager with Symantec Corp. was surprised by the lack of CIO, CTO and director of IT involvement. He hypothesized that three things could have contributed to lesser involvement. The first is that DR requirements are now built into the solution so it is expected that data is going to be recovered quickly and applications remain online, which means less IT management oversight.

"Secondly, it could be that CIOs have been recently coming from the finance side of the house so they are less involved with IT operations and thirdly, IT managers are focused on other priorities & that maybe there is a lot of distractions," said Lamorena.

Symantec also discovered that the amount of applications that IT Managers believed were business critical has increased 20 percentage points over data from the previous year, and of these applications only 54 percent were covered by DR plans.

"A lot more applications have risen in importance for daily operations of the business," Lamorena noted.

The survey also found approximately 47 percent of organizations tested their DR plans either once a year or less than once a year.

Reasons cited for why organizations dont do more testing include: lack of resources in terms of peoples time (39 percent), disruption to employees (39 percent), budget (37 percent) and disruption to customers (32 percent). In addition, 21 percent admitted they didnt test because DR testing could significantly disrupt sales and revenue.

Lamorena said the reason why companies were seeing disruptions was because they were taking production applications to test.

Symantec recommended using solutions that provide testing tools that minimize the impact of testing on customers, so that organizations can test without affecting business processes, customers and employees

. Additionally, Symantec suggested that enterprises implement a holistic data protection solution across virtual environments, remote offices, desktops, laptops, servers, applications and databases that can quickly recovery vital data and systems in the event of a disaster.

As well, Symantec advised that organizations implement automated solutions that minimize human involvement and address other weaknesses in their DR plans to help to reduce downtime.

As for the next survey, Lamorena predicted more executive involvement in DR, DR testing to be more frequent and the number of applications deemed to be mission-critical increasing. He cited SharePoint as an example.

Symantec interviewed 1000 IT managers and C-level decision makers responsible for DR plans in 15 countries including Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.