Over the past several years, virtualization has emerged as an easy and reliable way to improve disaster preparedness. This technology provides companies the ability to dramatically increase the efficiency and availability of their resources in the event of a disaster. Using virtualization, enterprises can ensure they are back online within minutes or hours, rather than days, weeks or months.
Most companies — from small businesses to fortune 500 corporations — are not prepared to recover from a fire, flood or other major disasters. Their DR plans are either weak or non-existent.
Here are some of the most common problems we find with traditional DR plans:
* Many are half baked.
* The plan is untested.
* Not all outsource partners are prepared.
* Recovery and production environments are incompatible.
Companies are increasingly abandoning their old DR platforms, and turning to virtualization technology to prepare their business for disaster and safeguard their assets.
The technology fundamentally changes the way back-end system resources are accessed and utilized. With regard to DR, a virtualized environment lets companies rapidly take snapshots of their servers, desktops and other components and store them on a storage area network (SAN) or other storage media. These snapshots are part of the virtual environment, which can then be restored to another data center location that has been equipped with virtualization technology. In some cases, environments can be replicated so that no restore is necessary.
Virtualization can help companies establish a highly reliable DR plan to greatly mitigate the impact of a disaster in several ways:
* Break the hardware dependency.
* Increase server portability.
* Nearly eliminate planned down time.
* Test rapidly and keep it current.
* Be mobilized for disaster.
Many virtualization platforms offer a tool that automates certain DR steps.
The key to an effective DR plan with virtualization is proper architecture and strategy. The right strategy can provide companies greater flexibility in managing their environments, creating a solid foundation for balanced, stable and continuous operations. With virtualization, companies have a way to create the strongest DR platform to protect their business and assets from disaster.
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on March 4, 2009
