Improving Business Continuity with VMware Virtualization

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Improving Business Continuity with VMware Virtualization
Business Continuity ChallengesImplementing plans to ensure business continuity for IT Key Benefitsinfrastructure is an essential requirement for organizations . Reduce downtime from both planned and unplanned today. Downtime of important applications is a costly outages.proposition and extended downtime can even be fatal- . Lower cost of effective business continuity solutions.industry research has shown that a significant number of companies that experience extended interruption to IT . Simplify infrastructure and processes for business services are likely to go out of business. In fact, according continuity.to the National Archives and Records Administration, 93 . Expand protection by cost-effectively extending percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days business continuity plans to more applications.or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Key Building BlocksWhile most organizations recognize the importance . The VMware Infrastructure software suite provides of business continuity, their ability to deliver effective not only the VMwareŽ ESX platform for x86 server protection for important applications is limited by the virtualization but also key components such as VMware following challenges: High Availability and Consolidated Backup.. Difficulty meeting recovery time and availability . VMwareŽ VirtualCenter provides centralized management goals. Many business continuity solutions fail to meet of virtual infrastructure deployments.organizations' requirements, leaving them at risk of . VMware Site Recovery Manager delivers pioneering extended downtime. Organizations are often unable to disaster recovery management and automation for adequately protect more than a few privileged systems, virtualized systems.particularly within their x86 server environment. . Professional services provided by VMware and authorized . High costs. Business continuity solutions become consulting partners ensure that customers can leverage exponentially more expensive as availability requirements expertise and best practices in their environment.increase. Many solutions require significant investments in additional hardware, software and services. Disaster recovery plans in particular often require duplicating data center infrastructure. These requirements drive up the VMwareŽ enables cost-effective, simpler and more reliable solutions cost of business continuity and result in a proliferation of for meeting business continuity requirements for x86 server underutilized servers. systems. Recent VMware surveys indicate that over 50 percent . High complexity. Traditional business continuity of VMware customers are already using VMware software to solutions are complex to implement, manage and execute. implement business continuity solutions.Managing the recovery infrastructure, maintaining up-to-date documentation of complex and often manual recovery procedures, and effectively testing plans all Ensuring Availability with VMware Virtualizationcontribute significant complexity. VMwareŽ Infrastructure 3 makes it possible to reduce both planned . Unreliable solutions: Testing complex business continuity and unplanned downtime, without the cost and complexity of solutions is challenging because testing often requires alternative solutions.significant equipment and personnel resources. The Organizations using VMware can slash planned downtime by complexity of traditional solutions makes them difficult eliminating most scheduled downtime for hardware maintenance. to maintain. Ensuring that sufficient staff are trained and VMwareŽ VMotion technology along with the maintenance mode available to execute recovery plans is also problematic. function in VMwareŽ Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) make Such challenges have limited the ability of organizations to it possible to move running workloads from one physical server to implement effective business continuity plans. As a result, another, without downtime or service interruption, enabling zero-key IT services lack the protection they require, putting downtime hardware maintenance. organizations at significant risk. IMPROVING BUSINESS CONTINUITY SOLUTIONS BRIEF
VMware helps protect against unplanned downtime from . Reliable recovery. VMware eliminates many of the common causes common failures, inclu... [download for more]