A new Zetta.net survey of more than 200 IT professionals revealed that traditional bare metal recovery (BMR) for backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is quickly becoming obsolete.

According to the Sunnyvale, California-based cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions provider’s research, nearly half of all BMR users report problems such as driver and hardware issues when they try to perform a restore.

“Bare metal recovery is often included in talk about backups and disaster recovery, but it sounds like it’s actually not that common in the field,” Zetta.net Content Marketing Manager Laura Knight wrote in a blog post.

Other survey results included:

“The recent study confirms that traditional BMR backups are marred with problems,” Chris Schin, Zetta.net’s vice president of products, told Talkin’ Cloud.

Traditional BMR is no longer a viable option

Zetta.net pointed out that traditional BMR restore is now “IT roulette” because it does not offer any guarantees.

“BMR has an anecdotal reputation for being wildly unreliable, but there don’t seem to be many numbers available on success or failure rates,” Knight said. “In other words, you might as well flip a coin.”

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Schin added that he believes Zetta.net’s DataProtect 4.5 cloud-based BDR service, however, can simplify BMR.

DataProtect 4.5 can provide “smoother, simpler recovery,” Schin noted, because it enables users to perform Windows image backups where a virtual hard disk (VHD) image file of an entire disk is created on a Windows system that also can be used for VHD BMR recovery.

“BMR is becoming much easier as more IT environments become virtualized. And with Zetta.net’s VHD BMR recovery, restore stays within the world of Windows and its virtualization platform,” Schin said.

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