Do you replicate your data remotely?

Companies are finally putting their money where their disaster recovery (DR) plans are. Today, 57% of Storage readers perform some sort of data replication to a remote location, and 51% of those who don't are planning to do it in the next two years. That's a marked increase over a similar survey in December 2004, when only 38% of respondents said they were doing remote replication.

By and large, Storage readers turn to their disk vendors for their replication needs, with 50% of respondents using array-based replication software like EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) or Network Appliance's SnapMirror. And despite industry predictions that replication functionality will increasingly run in the network, 43% of would-be replicators say they're also evaluating array-based software.

When readers say remote, for the most part, they really mean it. Forty-nine percent of replication users copy data to sites more than 100km away, while only 18% do metro-area replication ( < 10km).

Finally, 60% of the time, data replicators are also doing high-availability clustering, ensuring not only that their data is available to within seconds of a failure, but that their applications are continuously available, too. As one reader put it, "geographically dispersed replication goes hand-in-hand with disaster recovery."