Surveys of small and medium-size companies indicate this: for an increasing number of mission-critical applications, recoveries that stretch into hours can impact business revenues just as badly as recoveries that – just a few years ago – took a day or more. The need for faster recoveries has risen following server-room restructurings where administrators deploying new virtual machines and they worry about backing them up with the same comprehensive solution they previously applied to backing up physical machines.
The potential for a failed disaster recovery is increased when backup protection is inadequate. That is forcing administrators to reconsider their current backup solutions, and evaluating whether or not their current recovery scheme is robust enough to survive a disaster. One of the prime issues is the large number of tape-based backup systems, which have a tough time keeping up with today's ‘on all the time' application server requirements.
Tape on the way out as a backup medium. Traditional backup schemes have for decades included tape, but that is rapidly changing. File-and-folder tape backup schedules that could stretch for hours without impacting productivity are now butting up against uptime requirements that can, in many cases require servers to be up 24 hours a day except for planned machine updates.
