Virtualisation is top of agenda for disaster recovery

The research, among more than 400 IT managers and directors suggests that while 28% of organisations have already migrated to a virtualised IT environment, a further 67% are planning to do so in the next 12 months. Why: the study indicates that the primary reason is to improve their disaster recovery options. What's more, 95% of respondents also say that SANs (storage area networks) already form (30%), or will form in the next 12 months (65%), part of that virtualised infrastructure. John Abbot, founder and chief analyst with The 451 Group, who is among the keynote speakers at Storage Expo, reckons that the most significant change virtualisation brings is "the isolation of workloads from the underlying hardware". This translates, he says, into enhanced flexibility and the removal of the need to implement and maintain a single, uniform platform – in turn, resulting in significantly reduced costs, due to lower redundancy requirements and higher utilisation. Says Abbott: "While the added complexity at the planning stage of virtualisation can act as a barrier to new business, once users gain more confidence in the emerging set of new tools, then sales will accelerate." And he adds: "When properly implemented, virtual infrastructures can form the basis of automated backup, retention, business-continuance and disaster-recovery processes."