Bandwidth Determines Disaster Recovery Capabilities

By Greg McNevin

March 28, 2007: According to new research from F5 Networks there is a growing disconnect between bandwidth expense and disaster recovery objectives, putting backup data at risk and blowing out investments unnecessarily.

The research firm says that increasing bandwidth a popular but incomplete solution for improving Disaster Recovery capabilities, and commissioned Forrester Consulting to investigate. Called The Impact of the WAN on Disaster Recovery Capabilities, the survey covered 504 companies with 1,000 or more employees in North America (200) and Europe (304).

Forrester found that the majority of participants reported IT budgets ranging from $1 million to $100 million, with over 75 percent of businesses naturally considering the improvement of data recovery times and limit of data loss at both the data centre and remote sites critical. The twist is, many cited insufficient bandwidth as having a very strong impact on their ability to extend replication or remote backup data protection.

The survey also found that 63 percent of those polled agreed that their current bandwidth prevents them from extending replication or remote backup protection to remote sites. At the same time, 82 percent believed that “improving time to recovery and limiting data loss without increasing bandwidth is important.”

“Data loss at remote sites is currently a huge risk exposure for most enterprises…Before investing in additional bandwidth to support remote sites, improve the performance of existing replication technologies, or expand replication to other applications; [enterprises should] consider WAN acceleration offerings,” advises Forrester. “When evaluating WAN acceleration appliances, focus on the vendors that have made the time and investment to test the interoperability of their appliance with independent software vendors, storage vendors, and storage networking vendors.”

F5 says that the survey results highlight that while IT leaders may be well aware of WAN optimisation technologies, they are not yet connecting them with the opportunity to reduce bandwidth expenses.

“Our concern is that companies are settling for stripped-down disaster recovery systems when they don’t need to,” says Ameet Dhillon, Director of Product Management at F5. “Disaster recovery efforts can be made many times more efficient by using WAN optimization devices like WANJet, and at a fraction of the cost these companies are spending on bandwidth. Understanding the effects of the WAN can help IT leaders supercharge their data recovery and replication systems within existing limitations of time, money, and bandwidth.”

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