Whose Fault When You Have Downtime?

OK, time for a reality check. You either have a recovery plan or you don’t.

If you do have a recovery plan, are you sure it will work?

IBM reports 75% of all businesses with recovery plans do not conduct regular recovery testing.

But even if things go as planned, how realistic is the plan? Industry studies document that when downtime strikes, 33% of all recoveries do not go as planned.

Traditional recovery plans generally rely on the availability of a hot site.

• But even with annual testing, hot site recovery usually takes 1–3 days to get back up and running.
• 80% of data inaccessibility is due to human error, which can take 2–3 days to recover from traditional backup tapes.

In the meantime…what?

The truth is, you’re probably paying way too much for a plan that won’t deliver.

But the good news is that costs have dropped sharply. Whatever system you have in place now, you may be paying more in annual maintenance than the total cost of a state-of-the-art replacement that offers far greater reliability, regular testing and much faster recovery.

What if you don’t yet have a recovery plan? That means you probably rely on backup tapes. Industry studies show that recovery from tape backup fails 50% of the time. Most multi-server environments rely on a combination of software and a tape library to back up critical data. As these environments grow, the backups become more complicated, which makes recovery even trickier. Rarely do these users ever test a complete backup, and recovery winds up taking 1–3 weeks. The most critical application to recover is usually email. How long can your business tolerate email downtime? Even more significant – studies show that 70% of businesses that suffer major data loss are out of business within 2 years.

Bottom line: Newer recovery technology—which includes fault tolerant clustering, high-availability, virtualized storage and a virtualized tape library—is less expensivethan what businesses currently pay for hot site availability with 1–3 day recoverability. For smaller users, the cost of a virtual tape library is comparable to that of a traditional tape library, yet provides file recovery in a matter of minutes…and can be extended for total disaster recovery.

To learn how much better and more affordable new recovery technology is, I urge you to email me now at blosey@source-data.com or call me at 800-333-2669.