virtualization.info

Veaam has released a white paper titled: VMware Data Protection Report 2010, The Survey of 500 Enterprises. The report, which was written by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization and contains 19 pages. The paper contains key findings from a worldwide survey held with 500 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France with more than 1,000 employees.

This document gives great insight in the current challenges companies face when adopting virtualization, overall conclusion is that virtualization requires a change of mindset compared to traditional non-virtualized environments.

"…A major consequence of a physical IT mindset is that problems endured in this world continue to be seen as acceptable risks. However, the physical world limitations highlighted in this study are no longer applicable in the virtual world. In fact, with IT directors reporting that they plan to expand the

use of virtualization in their server infrastructure from 42 percent to 63 percent during the next two years, businesses are in a much better position to finally address these issues if they deploy the right virtualization-based data protection strategies…"

The paper covers the following topics:

• Introduction to Virtualization in the Enterprise

"…Physical server consolidation remains by far the top benefit of virtualization for many enterprises (71 percent). Nonetheless, after consolidation, improved disaster recovery (54 percent) and data protection (51 percent) are the top two most important advantages of adopting this technology globally and in many regions…"

• Approaches to Virtualization Backup and Recovery

"…Despite the growing trend of businesses transitioning more and more of their applications to virtual servers, particularly for mission-critical workloads, the research highlighted some areas of concern. Specifically, enterprise adoption of virtualization is actually being hampered due to fears around the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines. Nearly half (44 percent) of respondents indicated that concerns around backup and recovery prevented them from virtualizing certain missioncritical workloads…"

• Backup and Recovery Assurance

"…Data protection remains an ongoing challenge for businesses. In the past two years alone, nearly half (43 percent) experienced some form of data loss, which suggests there is much still to be done in this area…"

• Summary and Conclusions

"…CIOs often cite enhanced data protection as one of the primary reasons to virtualize, but the technology holds a huge amount of potential that businesses aren’t currently tapping into. Although virtualization is improving IT costs and efficiency, this survey highlights how similar strides have not been made in data protection. The state of virtualization-based data protection today has revealed the following key insights:

• Virtualization is fast becoming a business critical platform – moreover, it holds the potential to become the de facto platform for all IT infrastructure within the enterprise.

• Fears around data protection are a major barrier to increased adoption of virtualization in the enterprise.

• Businesses are recognizing that using traditional, physical backup and recovery tools for virtualization carries significant limitations and, subsequently, risks around data protection.

• Virtualization backup and recovery strategies are currently applied with a physical world mindset, but the right tools can transform the entire field of data protection…"