The topic of virtualised technology for disaster recovery is gaining interest and will be explored in detail at the Storage Expo being held in London later this month.
A study by the expo organisers of more than 400 IT professionals revealed 95% of organisations have migrated or are planning to migrate to virtualised IT environments in the next 12 months, as a means of improving their disaster recovery options.
The same percentage of respondents say storage area networks already form or will form part of their virtualised infrastructure in the next 12 months.
John Abbot, founder and chief analyst with research firm The 451 Group, and a keynote speaker at the event, says the most significant change virtualisation brings is the isolation of workloads from the underlying hardware. This enhances flexibility and eliminates the need to implement and maintain a single, uniform platform, resulting in significantly reduced costs, due to lower redundancy and higher utilisation.
“Added complexity at the planning stage of virtualisation can act as a barrier to new business, but when properly implemented, virtual infrastructures can form the basis of automated backup, retention, business-continuance and disaster-recovery processes,” Abbott says.
Abbot also predicts the virtualisation market will change over the next 12 to 18 months, and says vendors must adapt to these changes. Fortunately, most of them have already moved beyond a focus on local high availability toward remote availability and disaster recovery, he adds.
"Although VMware is still the dominant player by far, it's a certainty that Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat will gain significant market traction," Abbot notes. Due to this, cloud-based disaster recovery services represent an opportunity for vendors.
He adds that this type of business will likely not go to the consumer-oriented cloud services such as Amazon and Google.
"Traditional hosting vendors like SunGard are already moving in, targeting small businesses that are virtualising their primary sites but haven't had the resources to set up their own remote disaster recovery site," Abbot concludes.
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