Christophe's Corner

You know I spend too much time on email at night with the TV on because this sounds like a bad infomercial. But honestly, it is not only possible, but probably necessary, to improve your BC/DR capabilities and improve their economics.

The emergence of server virtualization as a tool for more efficient hot standby or recovery site is becoming mainstream much faster than previously thought. It makes sense that an IT organization can save in operational costs and asset costs by virtualizing hot stand-by servers. At the DR site, you could run a bunch of applications off of multiple virtual servers while really only using one physical server — don’t forget to make sure your data is there and that it gets replicated with full integrity. To do this you can use VMWare’s Site Recovery Manager combined with Hitachi through the SRA plug-in to automate DR testing and failover. Clearly, physical server redundancy and movement of virtual servers has to be baked in your processes (it’s a hot stand-by site after all). And tools like VMotion can help in optimizing the allocation of resources. If you combine this with functions such as tiered storage and thin provisioning on the storage, side you can do what you used to do before for less, plus you could actually leverage this infrastructure to expand your capabilities for BC/DR.

More for less? Hard to beat.