Business continuity and disaster recovery are made more difficult by the pace of business change. Adapting to market changes requires proactive IT. For the first time, you can consolidate business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning in a heterogeneous IT environment with a single, central automated solution.
Virtualization Improves Business Continuity
Centralized Command and Control of Enterprise Applications
The ChallengeAdapting to market changes requires proactive IT. To keep ahead of thecompetition, IT must be inherently flexible, capable of meeting demand forapplications and services from end-users inside and outside the companydynamically. Business continuity planning is application demand management forthe worst case scenario, requiring that IT departments ensure demand can bemet even in disaster situations.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are made more difficult by the pace ofbusiness change. Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, continuous performanceimprovement initiatives and shrinking application lifecycles put pressure on IT"Business continuity and disaster departments to keep an increasingly complex portfolio of applications running atall times - even in the event of a disaster. Typically a blend of automatedrecovery are the #1 concerns software tools, ad hoc scripts and intricate manual processes, business continuityamong CIOs." plans tend to patch together separate and discrete recovery plans that onlyaddress specific applications or platforms.- Gartner,as reported in eWeek, Oct. 2006 Continuous change is inevitable and driven by the need to improve results acrossan organization. Unlike a natural disaster or other emergency situations, plannedchanges are predictable. A business continuity solution must ensure, however,that unplanned changes are handled with minimal downtime for continuousbusiness operations and execution.
No Time for OutagesBusiness continuity and disaster recovery planning have evolved with thesophistication of technology solutions and business reliance on them. Whilebackup and off-site stand-by were sufficient in the past, high availability (HA)configurations and hot backups have become standard. Seamless failover hasbecome the natural outcome and is the expectation of the end-user, and this needhas been reinforced by technology-dependant supply chains and increasedregulatory scrutiny (e.g. through HIPAA and SOX). Systems always must beavailable, and the IT department has to keep more applications running withfewer resources.
Preventing disaster and responding to unanticipated service degradations andoutages is time-consuming in a homogeneous IT environment. In a best-of-breedsetting, the process is even more taxing, as backups and failover must account orthe specific platforms on which each application runs - in addition to enterpriseintegration and database servers which may support a number of applications ondifferent platforms. Procedures for maintaining continuity remain heavily manual,even if they are aided by automated systems, and excess equipment is applied toeach application as a standard practice. Overspending is built into IT budgets outof necessity.
HA configurations may mitigate manual intervention in business continuitypractices, but this comes at a clear cost. Custom scripts affect HA but emergeover time as responses to specific needs. Typically, scripts are documented poorlyand become intertwined with other ad hoc fixes to create a web of intertwinedprograms that do not run efficiently, complicate problem resolution and requireunnecessary resource hours to maintain. Virtualization Improves Business Continuity
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Intended to reduce the risk ofperformance degradation or outrightoutage, business continuity and disasterrecovery solutions become risk factors inthemselves while increasing IT costs in amanner that is disproportionate to thevalue they deliver. The emergentimportance of technology in poweringReal-time infrastructure (RTI) business activity calls for improvementsto business continuity practices.represents a shared IT Specifically, the IT department mustinfrastructure (across customers, address the challenge of mixed-architecture environments whilebusiness units or applications) in controlling costs. Figure1: FabricServer Conceptual Diagramwhich business policies and service- TMDataSynapse FabricServerlevel agreements (SLAs) drive DataSynapse FabricServer centralizes the command and control of applicationdynamic and automatic allocation deployment and executi... [download for more]
