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Achieve significant cost savings through consolidation of disaster recovery servers by combining the award-winning disaster protection of XOsoft's WANSync with the latest virtual server technologies from Microsoft and EMC. Consolidating disaster recovery servers on virtual machines can yield both reduced hardware costs and significantly lessened management burden.
Description of the Solution
Disaster recovery and business continuance capabilities are increasingly critical for businesses today. According to a study by accounting firm McGladrey and Pullen, 43% of companies that experience a disaster never re-open and 29% close within two years. Of those that do manage to survive, the long-term financial impact can be tremendous. As Figure 1 illustrates for publicly traded companies, an organization that does not respond effectively to a crisis faces a double penalty in the direct impact of the crisis and in a subsequent crisis of confidence by investors.
Costs of Business Continuance Capability
At the same time, two dynamics are driving up the total cost of maintaining an adequate business continuance capability.
The first dynamic is that the ever-growing numbers of IT-based business processes that are candidates for disaster recovery protection. For example, communication and collaboration systems like email, IP telephony, instant messaging and web portals are becoming increasingly central to revenue-generating business operations, even as increasing numbers of core business processes are becoming IT-based and driving growth in mission-critical database and web servers. Further, the need for redundancy to achieve performance goals, provide fault tolerance, and enable business continuance in the face of disasters is leading to significantly increased numbers of servers that must be managed.
The second dynamic arises from the fact that the complexity of management increases nonlinearly with the total number of systems. Each new server represents not just one additional unit of management work, but introduces from a few to many new interactions within the environment that must be tracked, understood, and managed.
To make things worse, much of this proliferation of systems is not only complex, but is wasteful as well. The typical utilization of an Intel-based server is in the range of 5% -15%. Even accounting for peak demand times, a huge percentage of server hardware, server software, and worst of all, server maintenance and management effort is wasted. A December 2004 Gartner Research report has stated that through 2007, "organizations with more than 200 servers will waste between $500,000 and $720,000 annually supporting underutilized application/server combinations.?
Server Consolidation
Server consolidation has become an accepted methodology for both increasing capacity utilization and decreasing management cost. In a December 2003 survey at its annual Data Center Conference, Gartner found that well over 90% of participants planned to undertake a server consolidation effort; two thirds already had projects underway. Server consolidation can provide direct reductions in hardware costs, but can also generate significant management cost savings and yield additional benefits in improved ability to manage security and availability.
Consolidation of systems for DR and business continuance purposes is something of a special case. On the one hand, to provide effective business continuance capabilities while keeping management complexity under control, DR replica systems must match production systems one to one. On the other hand, as systems intended solely to provide backup for production systems, utilization is typically extremely low. While it is not difficult to justify complete duplication of a few key mission-critical servers, applications and data, it is far less obvious when DR protection of the next tier of applications requires duplicating dozens or even hundreds of servers.
Enter the virtual machine.
Virtualization solutions like Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 and EMC's VMWareintroduce an abstraction layer that insulate the BIOS, operating systems and applications on Intel architectures from the physical hardware so that multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems, can all run simultaneously on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine, or VM, sees its own consistent, normalized set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded, as illustrated in Figure 2.
The use of VM technology to consolidate Intel-based servers has exploded over the last couple years. The reason is simple. According to a 2003 Gartner report, "Enterprises that do not leverage virtualization technologies will spend 25% more annually for hardware, software, labor and space for x86-based servers."
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