Disaster Recovery Drives Virtualisation Strategy - But many IT Personnel are not Aware of the Hidden Costs

LONDON, June 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

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 administrator's 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 than 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.

Another survey conducted by Diskeeper Corporation Europe of 500 IT personnel showed 80% were aware of the major problems of I/O bottlenecks.

Mandeep Birdi comments: "Effectively shared resources are of critical importance in a virtual environment, but are severely impacted by three key barriers: I/O bandwidth bottlenecks due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machines competing for shared I/O resources and not effectively prioritized across the platform, and, thirdly, virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted - an issue known as bloating. Instead free space is simply just wasted. These problems can result in actually costing the company unnecessary spend on additional hardware as well as time in dealing with the issues."

The survey also highlighted that 25% of respondents are not dealing with the problems of I/O bottlenecks, while 5% said they just purchase more disks/spindles.

Adding to this, Mandeep Birdi also reported that many IT users who are migrating to or have migrated over to a virtual environment, and have typically employed a SAN, are being told they don't need to defragment the SAN, and that there isn't an I/O bottleneck issue. He comments: "This is false. The I/O bottleneck issue can have a huge affect on performance, and if the customer is not aware that this is what's occurring in the SAN environment, it can again end up costing the company a lot of money with thinking they have to purchase more hardware, when in fact this might not be the case at all."

About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner

Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies(R): CIOs, IT Managers and System Administrators of Global Fortune 1000 and Forbes 500 enterprises rely on Diskeeper(R) performance software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their business laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite(R) fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity(R) 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX and Hyper-V eliminates the barriers to full virtual efficiency and maximum I/O performance on virtual servers. Diskeeper Corporation further provides real-time data protection and real-time data recovery with Undelete(R) data recovery software (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking(R ) technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).