Virtualizing disaster recovery helps ensure business resiliency while cutting operating costs
Introduction IT managers have eagerly implemented virtualization to reap its many benefits: lower hardware and energy costs, more flexibility, faster responsiveness to changing and new applications, and improved resiliency. But when disaster strikes, some IT managers find their disaster recovery techniques and hardware configuration have not kept pace with their changed production environment, and they’re stuck, along with their recovery times, in the pre-virtualization era. They falsely believe the improved day-to-day resilience of their virtualized environment lessens their need for disaster recovery planning. In fact, the opposite is true: Catastrophic hardware failures in virtualized environments bring down many more applications than in non-virtualized environments, making DR planning and implementation more critical, not less. Fortunately, the virtualization technologies that make production environments more resilient and responsive can also transform the responsiveness and speed of recovery of the DR environments that back them up. Indeed, virtualizing your DR environment, along with your production servers and storage, can dramatically improve recovery times as measured in both recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).Virtual DR is designed to increase the reliability of your recovery, mitigate risk for your enterprise and position you to implement the coming waves of IT innovation. These virtual recovery benefits also apply to the majority of IT applications that have not yet been virtualized. In those situations, an added major benefit is that virtualizing DR removes the problems inherent in recovering to dissimilar hardware, as is typically the case. That makes “physical to virtual” recovery much more reliable and faster.
•Date: 17th Sept 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
