Virtualization is a revolutionary technology that has emerged as one of the hottest trends in the IT segment. If you are not already leveraging the server virtualization wave as a means to deploy cost effective Disaster Recovery, then use this paper as a catalyst to transform your business today: virtualization enables greater efficiencies, faster application and data recovery, and overall cost savings.
LEVERAGING SERVER VIRTUALIZATION FOR
DISASTER RECOVERY
InMage Systems, Inc.
Published: May 26, 2008
Abstract Virtualization is a revolutionary technology that has emerged as one of the hottest trends in the IT segment. If you are not already leveraging the server virtualization wave as a means to deploy cost effective Disaster Recovery, then use this paper as a catalyst to transform your business today: virtualization enables greater efficiencies, faster application and data recovery, and overall cost savings. Virtual systems are being deployed at a rapid rate and the need to protect them is mission critical. InMage offers proven solutions for integrating virtualization into your Disaster Recovery plan. This white paper provides an overview of the issues and importance of a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan for virtualization, and shows how to incorporate Continuous Data Protection into your virtualized environment.
Introduction: Driving Forces for Virtualization and Disaster Recovery Virtual Server technologies are rapidly changing the Information Technology (IT) landscape. Virtualization provides organizations with the ability to get significantly more from their computing resources by enabling data and applications to be consolidated into a shared infrastructure. The benefits include reduced cost, increased efficiency, and simplified IT management. As organizations deploy virtual server technologies from leading vendors such as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Oracle, it is equally important that their data protection strategies evolve to meet the demands of this new computing environment. InMage's DR-Scout for Server Virtualization meets the challenge in providing an enterprise-class single solution for both continuous local backup and disaster recovery with full support for virtual environments. While server consolidation has become the must have budget item as organizations strive to increase competitiveness and cut costs, disaster recovery is emerging as a primary driver for virtual system deployments. Most early adopters of virtualization technologies cite server consolidation as a primary strategic goal. Reducing the number of physical servers an organization needs to deploy can dramatically reduce hardware and server management costs. Associated environmental costs related to power and space are also likely to drop. "The driving force for virtualization is consolidation, but disaster recover is the second phase," says Tom Bittman, Analyst, Gartner, Inc. As virtualization becomes mainstream, its impact on disaster recovery planning and implementation has become paramount. There are two major driving forces shaping business continuance and disaster recovery strategy: . Virtual server technologies enable businesses to consolidate data and applications onto a single physical server - resulting in reduced costs, simplified IT management, and environment savings. The result is a "virtual system" running multiple business critical applications - with significantly more risk in the event of a failure! Consequently, virtual systems demand advanced disaster recovery and business continuance solutions that protect the overall virtual environment. . Virtual server technologies can significantly lower the cost of disaster recovery. Historically, it has been relatively expensive to protect a production environment as the disaster recovery environment needed to essentially mirror the production environment (i.e., One server was needed to failover another server). With virtualization the hardware costs are significantly reduced as several production servers can now be hosted on a single DR target server running multiple Virtual Machines (VM's). This concept alone is revolutionizing how businesses are approaching disaster recovery and implementations are growing exponentially from the mid-tier through enterprise segments. Virtualization is a fast moving train and companies need to get on board to remain competitive. Research firm IDC forecasts the virtualization market to reach a robust $15 billion annually by 2009. InMage offers proven solutions for integrating virtualization into your Disaster Recovery plan to ensure that highly valuable virtual environments are adequately protected.
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