Time to recover and reducing cost are the biggest challenges in backup for organisations, according to a survey conducted by Double-Take Software. The next most significant difficulties were the ability to roll back to any point in time when recovering workloads and recovery testing.

These findings are the result of a survey into attitudes towards backup and the effect of virtualisation on business continuity strategies, conducted at October's Storage Expo show held in London. Virtualisation is already in place with the majority of those questioned, with 86 per cent of those surveyed having a virtual infrastructure in place within their organisations.

Further findings from the survey include:

-Tape backup is the most popular technology involved for recovery of virtual machines, with 60 per cent of organisations relying on tape to protect their virtualisation implementations. 53 per cent of organisations are using disk-to-disk backup products, while proprietary virtualisation products such as VMware's VMotion are used by 23 per cent
-17 per cent of organisations are only using tape backup for the backup / recovery of their virtual machines
-The number of respondents that were able to judge their recovery point objectives (RPO) when it came to virtualised environments was much lower than those able to define their recovery time objectives (RTO) only 45 per cent of those surveyed were able to state their satisfaction level around their RPOs.

Commenting on the findings, Ian Masters, UK sales and marketing director, Double-Take Software said, "The growth of virtualisation into a mainstream technology has been due to the cost savings that server consolidation can deliver, but the backup and recovery process is still not well understood. Knowing how to recover workloads back to the optimum point in time involves using the best practices that exist in the physical DR space, as well as knowing how to exploit the benefits of virtualisation. Having an approach in place that can handle both physical and virtual workloads, and carry out recovery onto any platform, is one way to reduce the cost of backup, as well as reducing recovery time."

"The percentage of organisations that are using only tape for their virtual machine backup and recovery is surprising," Masters continued. "Tape backup covers a single point in time and was not designed for the demands of virtualisation when it comes to the recovery of workloads. There is therefore a big potential for data to be lost in the event of a failure, and the time taken to recover can be substantial. Disk-to-disk replication of virtual machine workloads offers a better level of protection, as this approach can provide real-time protection for data, as well as the ability to roll back to any point in time using continuous data protection or snapshots."

The survey received 169 responses across a range of vertical markets and company sizes.

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