29 Jun 2009

DR risks of virtualisation

Many companies are embracing virtualisation in a bid to increase data availability and access to files; however, it is not a prudent course of action to rely on this technology solely during an emergency, it has been claimed.

Research carried out by SunGard Availability Services revealed that nearly three quarters (74 per cent) of respondents to a survey of IT professionals stated that businesses are happy to invest in virtualisation, but would not really solely on this technology in times of crisis.

Don Norbeck, technology officer for virtualisation and product strategy at SunGard, commented: "The Achilles heel of many virtualised IT environments is they depend on a single data centre to execute system failover should an outage occur. A recovery strategy with no offsite data centre can result in no recovery."

Meanwhile, a flaw in a virtual server was recently exploited by a hacker in the US who was able to delete the information contained on more than 100,000 websites which were stored on the equipment.