A survey conducted last year by Techtarget showed 33% percent planned to use a virtualization strategy to take advantage of the disaster recovery and high availability benefits. 23% also viewed virtualization’s benefits as a backup and data protection solution. A separate survey this year conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by CA Technologies showed downtime costs businesses more than 127 million person-hours per year.
“Ensuring uptime is at the top of every IT administrators list. With virtualisation you can automatically move virtual machines from one host to another and even from one data centre to another – so they’ll stay up and running, with little or no downtime, in case of a failure.” Says Mandeep Birdi, Senior Presales Consultant at Diskeeper Corporation Europe.
However, more that 30% of both VMware and Microsoft virtualisation users identified backing up VM data as a challenge, and also indentified storage management, I/O bottlenecks and server availability monitoring as major virtualisation challenges.