VM data recovery costs can be avoided

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Around a half of IT departments have wasted time carrying out a full recovery of a server just to revive a lost file or application item, research published by Veeam Software has shown.

Virtualisation is intended to make server set-ups easier, allowing instances to be created in a matter of minutes. This is often the case but, the research showed, it can take up to five hours to recover a virtualised machine. Of the 500 enterprises surveyed, 47 per cent appear to accept this, even for small returns.

The results of the study, conducted by independent market research firm Vanson Bourne, supported Veeam’s field of operation in VMware data protection. Ratmir Timashev, president and chief executive (CEO) of Veeam, said companies were failing to realise the full potential that virtualisation offers.

“For example, with instant VM recovery, it’s possible to reduce recovery time from hours to minutes,” he said.

“It’s also possible to recover individual files and application items without restoring the entire machine. And businesses can eliminate unnecessary risks associated with failed backups by automatically verifying the recoverability of every backup.”

Every month, nearly 63 per cent of organisations experienced problems when recovering a server, the report said. This amounted to a loss of over $400,000 (£250,000) every year on average because only two per cent of all backups were tested for recoverability.

When tests are done, they are often only performed once every two months, leaving businesses with up to 60 days of bad backups. Two common reasons given were it could take up to 13 hours to validate a single backup and a shortage of staff.

The three main reasons for server problems were: hardware failure (68 per cent), a general problem such as incorrect configuration (63 per cent), and users accidentally deleting files (56 per cent)

Timashev reckoned nearly half of full server recoveries could be eliminated with the proper tools.

For the study, to be published in October, Vanson Bourne surveyed 500 IT directors from organisations in the UK, US, Germany and France. Each company employed more than 1,000 people.

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