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Bandwidth Expense at Odds with Disaster Recovery Objectives, Study Shows

March 27, 2007 - Enterprise Systems, James E. Powell

Results of a new Forrester Consulting study released today show that while 75 percent of respondents considered shorter data recovery times and limiting data loss at backup data centers and remote sites are critical, insufficient bandwidth impacts their ability to extend replication or remote backup data protection.

The study, commissioned by F5 Networks, Inc., analyzed responses from a Web-based survey of 200 North American and 304 European (304) companies firms with 1,000 or more employees, most with IT budgets ranging from $1 to $100 million.

Survey results also showed that 63 percent of companies polled agreed or strongly agreed that their current bandwidth prevents them from extending replication or remote backup protection to remote sites. At the same time, 82 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that "improving time to recovery and limiting data loss without increasing bandwidth is important."

The 2007 study examined the impact of wide-area networks (WAN) on business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) by asking leaders of IT, enterprise architecture, and network operations to participate. The respondents indicated that BC/DR accounted for an average of 21 percent of their IT budget, with bandwidth accounting for 26 percent of total replication or remote backup costs.

According to Forrester Consulting, "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. 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."

According to F5 Networks, itself a WAN optimization vendor, such optimization tools help enterprises "better use existing bandwidth, mitigate application latency, and increase availability to improve recovery capabilities. While 75 percent of survey participants report that they're aware of the technology, F5 says that when viewed as a whole, the survey results show that IT leaders haven't yet connected the technology with reducing bandwidth expenses."

"Our concern is that companies are settling for stripped-down disaster recovery systems when they don't need to," said 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."

James E. Powell is the editorial director of Enterprise Systems.You can contact James E. Powell about Bandwidth Expense at Odds with Disaster Recovery Objectives, Study Shows at jpowell@esj.com