The failure by many large enterprises to monitor the backup and recovery of their virtualised data is costing tens of thousands of pounds in failed data recoveries.
According to research from Veeam only 2% of large enterprises it quizzed were testing for recoverability each year and 63% of companies revealed that the current cost of trying to cope with server failures was $400,000 every year.
With hardly any firm testing virtual backups it was a shock when the process took place with firms reporting back around 60 days of bad backups and a wait for 13 hours to perform the process.
Part of the problem comes from the split between those buying storage and the staff responsible for software and virtualisation presenting resellers with an opportunity to use the research findings to underline the need for a coordinated strategy.
"In larger companies virtualisation and storage has been managed by different groups, " said Veeam president and CEO Ratmir Timashev (pictured), "they don't understand virtualisation that well and are not aware of all of the opportunities."
The vendor is taking the research out to resellers hoping that providing them with the ammunition they will be able to break down user ignorance around the problem.
I was somewhat shocked that £250,000 is wasted annually on recovering virtual machines and reeks of companies closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Quite simply, the best way to minimise a costly recovery process is prevention in the first place. By real-time and deep reaching monitoring of your VMware environment you get immediate notification of hardware failures and can even pre-empt potential issues and the resulting cost and downtime by highlighting key areas of load. That some companies only performed a check once every two months, leaving the businesses open to up to 60 days of bad backups is a clear failure of the IT Manager’s core responsibility to maintain uptime of the business.
Marina Gil-Santamaria, Director of Product Marketing, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold
I was somewhat shocked that £250,000 is wasted annually on recovering virtual machines and reeks of companies closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Quite simply, the best way to minimise a costly recovery process is prevention in the first place. By real-time and deep reaching monitoring of your VMware environment you get immediate notification of hardware failures and can even pre-empt potential issues and the resulting cost and downtime by highlighting key areas of load. That some companies only performed a check once every two months, leaving the businesses open to up to 60 days of bad backups is a clear failure of the IT Manager’s core responsibility to maintain uptime of the business.
This further outlines the fragmented way in which larger organisations deal with critical IT infrastructure and process. Any project which will affect the amount or type of data being backed up e.g. virtualisation, should involve the backup admin as part of the project group.
If customers are not working in this way then best practice for resellers should be to try and engage with all parties to deploy and sustain a succesful solution.