IT Survey Reveals: Most Companies at Financial Risk Due to Untested, Critically Slow Disaster Recovery Systems
IT Survey Reveals: Most Companies at Financial Risk Due to Untested, Critically Slow Disaster Recovery Systems
By VSM News Staff published: Monday, April 16 2007
Scalent Systems Poll of IT Leaders Indicates Best Case Company Downtime Measured in Days
PALO ALTO, Calif.-A survey of more than 500 senior IT professionals reveals that a staggering 89 percent test their disaster recovery/failover systems once a year or less, leaving these companies exceptionally vulnerable to massive technology and business failures in the event of a disaster.
In addition, some 70 percent of respondents said it would take at least four hours (half a day) – and more than 50 percent stated it would take multiple days – for their servers to recover completely from failure, including restored software, configuration, and network and storage connectivity.
The survey, conducted by Brilliant Ideas, LLC for Scalent Systems, disclosed that nearly 67 percent of respondents were only “minimally confident” that their disaster recovery (DR) system would work as planned in the event of a disaster. Scalent Systems is the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software for large data centers.
These findings underscore the business and financial risks faced by companies that have not taken steps to ensure they can quickly recover from IT disasters.
Data center downtime is very costly for companies. Industry researchers estimate that a company loses an average of $84,000 to $90,000 for every hour of downtime. Also, more than 90 percent of companies that experience one week of data center downtime will be out of business within 12 months, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
“Companies every day face a variety of threats that could bring their systems down,” said John Humphreys, Program Director at IDC Research. “Even companies that don’t rely on their IT infrastructure for high-volume business transactions should recognize that slow recovery in the event of a disaster can seriously impact customers, employees, and shareholder value. A highly reliable, cost effective and straightforward DR and HA environment is quickly becoming a key to deliver business services that span server, storage and network elements.”
Poor failover performance and non-optimal DR strategies are putting companies at risk.
“With so much riding on their IT infrastructure, companies should adopt a disaster recovery approach that can recover large numbers of servers and their associated network and storage connectivity in less than five minutes, guarantee zero differences between production and back-up systems, and automatically validate DR capabilities on a regular basis,” said Kevin Epstein, Vice President, Products, Scalent Systems.
Scalent’s adaptive infrastructure software encapsulates each existing server’s software stack, placing it on central storage, and then virtualizes the network and storage connectivity of each physical server, so that any server or set of servers can appear to be any others on the network. As a result, if any physical server fails, any other server can be “turned into” the failed server in the time it takes to reboot. This “rack once, cable once” scenario means that there is no need for manual re-imaging or re-cabling, and the replacement server is an exact duplicate of the original, eliminating configuration issues.
In addition, Scalent software does not degrade server performance, nor does it introduce a new point of failure, because it does not sit in the data path. Should Scalent’s controller ever fail, servers simply maintain their existing topography until Scalent is restarted. There is no service interruption.
“Scalent’s software creates an adaptive infrastructure. Put simply, it can take a situation from dead bare metal to a live (or revived) data center, in five minutes or less. Any failed server and applications connected to any network linked to any storage can be brought back in the space of boot time,” Epstein said.
About Brilliant Ideas, LLC
Brilliant Ideas, LLC is a specialty consulting and analysis firm based in Silicon Valley, California. Brilliant Ideas provides assistance to high tech companies’ market research, sales, field, outbound and corporate marketing functions. Additionally, Brilliant Ideas periodically engages in independent research and publication on topics of common industry interest, including data center benchmarking, virtualization, and business continuity. Over the last decade, Brilliant Ideas is pleased to have provided insight for many of Silicon Valley’s best known high-tech companies.
About Scalent
Scalent Systems is the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software to large data centers. Scalent Systems’ adaptive infrastructure software, a 2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year award winner, lets large data center managers radically increase data center flexibility and reaction time. Using Scalent software, companies have been able to implement cost-effective Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, and Test Lab / Capacity Automation solutions, while realizing the benefits of reduced infrastructure overhead, simplified manageability, and increased system performance. Many of the Fortune 1000 companies rely on Scalent to support their success, having adopted the software as an integral part of their business plans.
Scalent and the Scalent logo are trademarks of Scalent Systems in the United States and/or other countries.
