"There has been a 'significant increase' in the number of organisations rethinking their disaster recovery (DR) plans because of virtualization."

Writes TechWorld in this article on Symantecs fourth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey. More than half of the respondents (55 percent) are rethinking their DR plans, and in North America, this rises to 64 percent.

"Virtualization has crept out from the developer test environments, where it was not part of the enterprise DR plan, and has made the shift into production environments," said Dr Guy Bunker, Symantec's chief scientist.

"In the old days, when you had one server running all the enterprise software, DR plans used to be straight forward," added Bunker. "Now the virtual server can be running up to 20 apps, and the server must have the capacity to handle it. DR processes have broken down because IT admins haven't thought of these issues."

Rather worryingly, 35 percent of respondents to the survey said that their virtual servers were not covered in their organisations' DR plans, and only 37 percent backup their virtual systems.

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