Many organisations are hitting a brick wall when it comes to fully deploying virtualisation in their environments. According to a recent survey, businesses are still unsure about the ability to back up and recover their virtual machines, causing many organisations to avoid virtualising their entire infrastructure and hitting the phenomenon which has become known as "VM stall."
An organisation reaches VM stall when it hits a point in its virtualisation journey where it just can't seem to get beyond a certain percentage virtualised. The average stall point seems to be somewhere around 40 percent, and this can be caused by a number of factors. However, one factor seems to be common across most organisations falling into this trap: VM stall will typically occur when a company no longer feels comfortable virtualising. This wariness usually stifles a virtualisation deployment before reaching mission- or enterprise-critical applications, leaving a virtual environment made up of more or less "low-hanging fruit" applications.
Backup and recovery software provider Veeam recently finished up a survey of around 500 CIOs from organisations across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The survey looked to identify the impact of virtualisation on data protection strategies. What it found was that enterprise adoption of virtualisation is actually being hampered due to fears around the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines.
According to the survey, on average, approximately half of all servers are viewed by CIOs today as mission-critical, and with 42 percent penetration, virtualisation is fast approaching the mission-critical application stage.
Veeam's "VMware Data Protection Report 2010" survey included other interest findings as well, such as:
- Nearly half (44 percent) of respondents indicated that concerns around backup and recovery prevented them from virtualising certain mission-critical workloads.
- Yet at the same time, only 68 percent of production-level virtual servers are currently being backed up; and more specifically, only 29 percent of organisations back up their entire virtual estates.
- And of those servers and virtual machines that are being backed up, only 2 percent are being tested for recoverability each year.
- Nearly two-thirds of organisations experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server. These failed recoveries cost the average enterprise more than $400,000 a year.
On a positive note for Veeam and other virtualisation backup and recovery solution providers, the survey did find that attitudes among organisations are indeed changing. According to the survey results, 59 percent of businesses are now planning to deploy a virtualisation-specific solution to back up virtual servers.