IT Pros Face Backup Woes

IT professionals face several challenges trying to back up the growing amount of data generated by their organizations, according to the results of a new survey from Double-Take Software. The goal of the survey was to learn what server backup technologies and methods are used by IT and what obstacles they face.

Almost all of the 358 U.S. and U.K. IT admins questioned in the survey cited reliability, cost, and recovery time as their toughest challenges in their backup strategies. Many of them also were dissatisfied with their current backup products and were particularly concerned about the reliability of recovering data.

The IT pros questioned by Double-Take Software cited several key goals and priorities for backing up and recovering their organization's data, including cutting the costs of their backup systems, improving the overall reliability of those systems, trimming the time it takes to recover data, recovering data to any point in time, reducing the risk of data loss, and testing their recovery processes.

Double-Take Software is a company that sells backup solutions. So naturally it has a vested interested in the results of a survey like this. Though I'm always cautious of vendor-sponsored surveys, I thought the results of this one were still interesting.

As some specific examples, improving backup reliability was cited as a small challenge by 36.9 percent of those questioned, a medium challenge by 35.8 percent, and a big challenge by 15.1 percent. Reducing the risk of data loss was seen as a small challenge by 32.4 percent, a medium challenge by 36.6 percent, and a big challenge by 20.1 percent.

Reducing recovery time was considered a small challenge by 26.3 percent, a medium challenge by 36 percent, and a big challenge by 29.9 percent. And backing up and recovering data at remote sites was seen as a small challenge by 29.1 percent, a medium challenge by 30.4 percent, and a big challenge by 24.9 percent.

What backup and recovery methods are these IT pros using? The survey found that more than 50 percent of IT admins still use tape backup, which Double-Take Software considers less reliable for recovery purposes than disk-to-disk or other technologies. Many do use disk-to-disk technologies, while some use real-time data duplication methods, such as disk mirroring.

Naturally, many IT staffers use multiple backup technologies in their data centers. Surprising to me, a small percentage said they have no backup or recovery protection at all on some servers. But the survey didn't specify what types of servers these might be.

The survey also asked IT admins about their backup and recovery techniques for virtualized environments. Here, more than 50 percent said they use tape backup, 45 percent use disk-to-disk or SAN-to-SAN replication, and many use VMware products such as Vmotion, VMware Site Recovery Manager, or VMware Data Recovery. Among those surveyed, 23 percent said they currently have no virtualized environments.

In the virtual world, most IT admins seem pleased with their solutions, as more than 60 percent said they're okay, satisfied, or very satisfied with the products they use to back up and recover their virtualized servers.

I'd like to hear from other IT pros out there. Do you fall in line with the results of the survey? What challenges and obstacles do you face keeping your servers safely and securely backed up?