New HP - FalconStor Agreement Provides Mid-Sized Companies with Verifiable Disaster Recovery Solution

The confidence that mid-sized companies exhibit in their ability to successfully recover from disasters is remarkable in light of the lack of evidence that there is to support it. Recent surveys have uncovered that this confidence is often misplaced and may even be setting them up for some nasty surprises down the road. So for those who are ready to put in place a verifiable disaster recovery (DR) plan, the recently announced managed services and reseller agreement between HP Enterprise Services and FalconStor Software may provide the solution they need.

A report that came out in late 2009 that surveyed 1650 small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) revealed that 82% of them were somewhat or very satisfied with their disaster recovery plans while 84% felt somewhat or very protected in the event a disaster struck. However that same report also found that only 23% of them backup their data on a daily basis and that over half of them do not have a plan to deal with disasters such as virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters.

A separate study of 1200 mid-sized companies that was completed in 2008 found that 70% of these companies view disaster recovery (DR) capabilities as "essential" to their business. Yet in this same report less than 25% of those companies in that same survey expressed confidence that their DR strategy would work.

Now one and two years have respectively passed since these studies were completed and, in that time, one has to wonder if companies are really any better positioned to successfully execute on a DR plan than they were when these surveys were conducted.

One could certainly see why these companies think they are.  The technologies that they have at their fingertips to do backup have gotten both better and more economical when one considers that:

• The introduction of disk into the backup process has increased the speed and reliability of backups to unmatched levels
• Deduplicating backup data makes it easier, faster and more economical to replicate data offsite
• Server virtualization makes it possible to recover application servers almost anywhere on any hardware platform
• The cost of networking, server, and storage hardware continues to decrease even as these technologies offer more capacity and performance

Yet completing backup jobs successfully and spending less time managing backups does not automatically translate into a successful DR plan. All it does is set the stage for these size organizations to put one in place.

It is for these reasons that the new managed services relationship and reseller agreement between HP Enterprise Services and FalconStor Software makes so much sense as this relationship offers the following:

• Heterogeneous replication technology. Using the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), HP BCRS can offer SMBs a large number of new backup and replication options. For instance, they can use the NSS to virtualize existing storage capacity, configure it for backup and then replicate the backup data offsite. Alternatively if they are already using a disk based backup target, they can create a disk-to-disk-to-disk (D2D2D) configuration where data is initially first backed up to their existing disk backup solution and then copied to the NSS which can they replicate the data to another site.
• Leverage HP BCRS data centers as offsite replication targets. One of the problems with replicating data offsite is the need to first have a secondary data center to which to replicate the data. As HP BCRS maintains 60 data centers in 40 countries around the world, SMBs can use the FalconStor to enable service to replicate data to these sites.
• Expertise. Replicating data offsite sound simple in theory but it is complex to setup and manage on an ongoing basis. HP Enterprise Services can provide the initial expertise that SMBs need to initially configure the FalconStor NSS replication and then manage it on an ongoing basis.

SMBs need to be careful not to overestimate their abilities to recover data in the event of a disaster. Backups that complete successfully and on time do not automatically translate into a working and verifiable DR plan. Only by putting in place a solution such as the FalconStor NSS that actually replicates backup data offsite which is first configured and then managed by experts such as what HP Enterprise Services offers can they verify that they have a workable DR solution.