The majority of CIOs feel their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the volume of data and servers in their organisations grows.
This is according to Veeam Software's virtualisation data protection survey, which revealed that 88% of CIOs experience capability-related challenges with backup and recovery.
The survey sampled 500 CIOs from organisations across the UK, the US, Germany and France and found that enterprises are still not experiencing the full benefits that virtualisation brings to data protection, with capabilities, complexity and cost all affecting implementations.
"At first glance, the fears of CIOs look to be correct despite the potential for faster, more efficient data protection that virtualisation offers, and the advances modern data protection tools can provide; and recovery times have increased since 2011," says Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO at Veeam Software.
Key findings
Key findings of the survey revealed that 68% of CIOs feel their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the volume of data and servers in their organisations grows.
Recovery of virtual servers is a little faster than that of physical servers, at five and six hours, respectively, which is worse than in 2011, when recovery took four and five hours, respectively.
The survey revealed that 58% of CIOs are planning to change their backup tools for virtual environments by 2014. Currently, virtual infrastructure accounts for 51% of enterprise servers, with this expected to grow to 63% in 2014.
"Virtualisation isn't just the future of the modern data centre; it's the reality right now, and a modern data centre needs modern data protection built for virtualisation," says Timashev.
Some 88% of CIOs said capability challenges affect their ability to back up and recover virtual servers, while 84% cited complexity challenges and 87% cost issues.
Similarly, 77% of those enterprises using agent-based backup tools were experiencing problems or management issues with the technology. These included excessively complex management (43%), backups failing too often (32%), restores failing too often (28%), the cost of the technology (20%), and agents slowing the performance of servers (18%).
IT, research and advisory company, Gartner reports similar findings to those of Veeam on the frustrations companies experience with legacy backup tools. Gartner reports that server virtualisation penetration is now over 60% and is on the way to surpass 80%.
According to Veeam, the problem with virtualisation is that most backup tools were built for the physical environment and this constrains how they support virtual environments. These retrofitted tools do not leverage the virtual environment to verify backups and they also require agents in virtual machines for granular recovery, application-consistent backups and other essential functions.
Virtual hope
The survey reveals that 58% of enterprises are planning to change their backup tools used for virtual servers by 2014, with 51% changing due to total cost of ownership and 42% due to current hardware and software costs.
Complexity is a reason to change for 47%, while failure to meet recovery time objectives, at 32%, and recovery point objectives, at 24%, are also factors.
"Virtualisation is reaching a turning point. Organisations have realised the benefits that the technology can bring on its own; now they are beginning to find out what it is truly capable of when managed and applied correctly. Modern data protection tools, specifically built for virtualisation, can unlock this potential as well as eliminate many of the capability, complexity and cost issues IT departments face," Timashev explains.
"For example, reducing the cost of techniques such as replication allows enterprises to protect far more of their vital infrastructure from server downtime, saving millions of dollars in the process. Virtualising recovery means enterprises can test more of their backups, rather than the mere 7% regularly tested at present. Most importantly, using the appropriate tool for the job means CIOs can recover either individual items or entire servers in far less than five hours," he continues.
Sam Routledge, solutions director at Softcat, a Veeam client and supplier of IT solutions, dealing with software, hardware and licensing, notes that virtualisation has brought a massive wave of change to the data centre.
"One of the areas that is changing significantly due to the advent of virtualisation is backup and recovery. Virtualisation-specific backup techniques redefine the economics of protecting your environment, enabling cost-effective replication for any application and eliminating the need for traditional agent-based technology," he notes.
"As the march of virtualisation in the data centre continues, customers should be freeing themselves from the limitations of physical backup," he concludes.
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