Interesting results from a Vision Solutions survey

I’m always watching for stats and numbers in the industry. We are continuously presented with the “fastest growing” and “x% better than the competitor” based on a number of sometimes skewed statistics. While I love what information I can gather from statistics for hardware and software, it is almost always based on sales.

When I was given some statistics recently by my friends at Vision Solutions, I really dug in because these numbers presented some interesting views on what is happening in the technology. Of course, I know that even these numbers may be open to a certain amount of interpretation, but hopefully you can read some of the same information that I have from it.

Consistency across the results

This survey was done using 985 respondents who ranged in company size. Here is the description of the survey participants:

vision-survey-respondents

The interesting thing is that we see information which is contrary to much of what is trending in the world of marketing IT solutions. It isn’t that all-flash, or public cloud, or any of the specific big trends aren’t real. What it does show is that there is a big representation of the “middle class” of technology consumers.

  • 51% indicated that storage growth was between 10-30% per year
  • Replication features was nearly even at 39% for hardware and 35% for software
  • Tape isn’t dead – 81% of respondents use tape as part of their data protection solution

There are more details throughout, but these jumped out at me in particular.

Test the plan, don’t plan the test

A frightening number that came from the survey was that 83% of respondents had no plan, or were less than 100% confident that their current plan was complete, tested and ready to execute. One word reaction to this: Wow!

vision-confidence

As Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Many people that I have spoken to have a long lead up to their BCP/DR test and a significant portion of the planning is one-time activities to ensure the test goes well, but just to satisfy the test, not necessarily to build a self-healing infrastructure which is where we should be working towards.

To date, one of my most popular blog post series is my BCP/DR Primer:

BCP/DR Primer – An introduction to planning your IT recovery strategy Part 12345

This is a clear sign in my mind that people are continually looking for resources and tools to build, or re-evaluate their BCP plan. Since I’m a Double-Take user, the combination of all this hits pretty close to home. I’ve been using products with online testing capability for a number of years which helps to increase the confidence for me and my team that we are protected in the event of a significant business disruption at the primary data center.

Enterprises love their pets

keep-calm-and-love-petsWith years of work in Financial Services and enterprise business environments, I get to see the other side of the “pets versus cattle” debate which is the abundance of pets in a corporate data center. Sometimes I even think the cattle have names too.

Legacy application environments are a reality. Not every existing application has been or will be developed as a fully distributed n-tier application. There are a significant number of current and future applications that are still deployed in the traditional model with co-located servers, single instances, and other architectural challenges that don’t allow for the “cloudy” style of failure.

There is nothing wrong with this environment for the people who are mapped to this model today. Most organizations are actively redesigning applications and rethinking their development practices, but the existence of legacy products and servers is a reality for some time to come.

Evolving application and data protection

I’m a fan of Double-Take, so I’m a little biased when I see great content from Vision Solutions 🙂 What I take away from this is that there are a lot of us who may not have the ideal plan in place, or may not have an effective plan in place at all for a BCP situation. The content of seeing people’s preparation is only half of the story.

vision-dataloss

Having a plan is one thing, but seeing what the results of real data loss and the reason behind it is particularly important. Using manual processes is definitely a fast track to issues.

Beyond orchestration, the next step I recommend is using CDP (Continuous Data Protection) where possible. My protected content (servers, volumes and folders) are asynchronously replicated, plus I take daily snapshots for full servers and semi-hourly snapshots of file data. This ensures that multiple RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives).

In the event of a data corruption, the corruption would be immediately replicated…by design of the protection tool. Using a previous RPO snapshot prevents the risk of a total data loss by using an automated snapshot. Phew!

Ultimately, the onus is on us to enhance the plan, build the process, and evaluate the tools. If you want to find out more on how I’ve done data and server protection, please feel free to reach out to me (eric at discoposse dot com) and if you want to find out more on the Vision Solutions portfolio and Double-Take, you can go right to the source at http://www.VisionSolutions.com and there are some great whitepapers and resources there to help out.

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