Databases Ignored In Disaster Recovery Plans

Databases usually contain vital company information but a new survey has revealed that a third of companies admit their disaster recovery plans does not protect their entire database.

That was amongst the findings of a new survey from enterprise data protection specialist, Sepaton. It surveyed 100 storage managers from the FTSE 1000 in October and November.

It seems that other than the challenge of protecting their business-critical applications, storage managers in the UK are also under pressure to demonstrate a measurable return on total cost of ownership, whilst dealing with pressure to streamline business processes and meet service level agreements.

“Storage managers are good at being under pressure – they need to be,” said Christo Conidaris, EMEA director for Sepaton. “Every day they face demands for quicker restore and backup across an increasing range of databases and applications, then they face the fallout of the resulting data growth. On top of it all, they are under pressure to meet business-specified SLAs and achieve a demonstrable return on investment.”

Almost two-thirds (60 percent) of participants said databases were the most critical element of the business to backup and restore, followed by email (29 percent), Unix file and print data (22 percent) and Windows file and print data (21 percent). When respondents were asked if their disaster recovery plan protected their entire database, 30 percent said it did not.

Most storage managers expect data growth to continue, with 48 percent saying they store 6 to 20TB (Terabytes); 16 percent said 21-50TB; 14 percent answered 51-100TB; and 15 percent had between 101 and 200 TB. Incredibly, 7 percent said they were handling more than 200TB of data.

Most storage managers (64 percent) said that they conduct daily frequent incremental backups; but four percent stated they only conduct incremental backups on a weekly basis; and 5 percent admitted they didn’t have a set schedule.

And it seems that tape is still playing a significant role in their backup strategy, with only 9 percent saying that they do not use tapes in their backup.

But Conidaris is less than impressed with the lingering fondness for tape.

“Tape simply cannot keep up with this pace and scale,” he insisted. “Storage managers are finding salvation in technologies such as deduplication, replication and virtual tape libraries (VTL), that can provide longer online retention, faster performance, optimised capacity, enhanced data protection and ensure a manageable total cost of ownership.”