Virtualization Strategies News, Analysis, White Papers and Case Studies on Virtualization Software and Hardware Strategies

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. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

In today’s business climate, the need to protect critical IT systems is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Providing a high level of data protection while keeping costs at a minimum can be a challenge for many organizations. Just ask Endocare,  an innovative medical device company, that lost their parent domain controller in July, 2007. The situation was a candid reminder that Endocare needed a real-time way to recover from a disaster.

Endocare solved their disaster recovery problems with two technology vendors, Double-Take Software and VMware, who provided virtualization solutions to consolidate and reduce hardware requirements to solve this exact business problem. VMware provides the virtualization platform while Double-Take Software provides the real-time data replication and recovery software. In this case, using virtualization with Double-Take Software allowed Endocare to implement a real-time disaster recovery solution that would otherwise be cost prohibitive in a non-virtual environment. Read More…

Posted under Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies

HP recently launched free online classes and this one is very valuable to all business small and large. It gives a detailed over view of the benefits of virtualization, compares disaster preparedness through virtualization with other business continuity plans and provides the business benefits of deploying a virtualization IT strategy.

Virtualization Can Help Keep Your Business Running in the Case of Disaster

Virtualization, as it relates to disaster recovery, is about simplifying the disaster recovery infrastructure requirements and reducing costs through eliminating the need for redundant hardware. You can think of virtualization as making a single physical device (such as a storage device, server or operating system) appear to function as multiple logical resources or making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices and servers) appear as a single logical resource.

Without virtualization, a business continuity plan is time consuming, expensive, complex, slow and unreliable.

Read More…

Posted under Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Strategies