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Virtualization Improves Business Continuity
Centralized Command and Control of Enterprise Applications
The Challenge
Adapting to market changes requires proactive IT. To keep ahead of the competition, IT must be inherently flexible, capable of meeting demand for applications and services from end-users inside and outside the company dynamically. Business continuity planning is application demand management for the worst case scenario, requiring that IT departments ensure demand can be met even in disaster situations.
No Time for Outages
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning have evolved with the sophistication of technology solutions and business reliance on them. While backup and off-site stand-by were sufficient in the past, high availability (HA) configurations and hot backups have become standard. Seamless failover has become the natural outcome and is the expectation of the end-user, and this need has been reinforced by technology-dependant supply chains and increased regulatory scrutiny (e.g. through HIPAA and SOX). Systems always must be available, and the IT department has to keep more applications running with fewer resources.
Preventing disaster and responding to unanticipated service degradations and outages is time-consuming in a homogeneous IT environment. In a best-of-breed setting, the process is even more taxing, as backups and failover must account or the specific platforms on which each application runs ? in addition to enterprise integration and database servers which may support a number of applications on different platforms. Procedures for maintaining continuity remain heavily manual, even if they are aided by automated systems, and excess equipment is applied to each application as a standard practice. Overspending is built into IT budgets out of necessity.
HA configurations may mitigate manual intervention in business continuity practices, but this comes at a clear cost. Custom scripts affect HA but emerge over time as responses to specific needs. Typically, scripts are documented poorly and become intertwined with other ad hoc fixes to create a web of intertwined programs that do not run efficiently, complicate problem resolution and require unnecessary resource hours to maintain.
Intended to reduce the risk of performance degradation or outright outage, business continuity and disaster recovery solutions become risk factors in themselves while increasing IT costs in a manner that is disproportionate to the value they deliver. The emergent importance of technology in powering Real-time infrastructure (RTI).
Complex infrastructures are commonplace in today's IT environments, as that service levels are predictable businesses select best-of-breed solutions to derive an advantage in the market and consistent, despite the rather than streamlining IT operations at the expense of business opportunity.
FabricServer stores application servers, code, and configurations in a component called the FabricBroker. FabricBroker is the heart of FabricServer, dynamically disseminating applications across the server farm to run in a flexible environment based on specific roles and priorities defined by the business and real-time end-user demand metrics. FabricServer holds a pre-defined baseline of rules and priorities in FabricBroker which can be overridden by spikes in demand or manually as needed. FabricServer dynamically provisions resources in accordance with application demand and responds to availability events in real-time ? shifting from dynamic provisioning to problem response immediately and predictably.
The pooling of resources affected by FabricServer creates a web of failover for every drive, processor and application component in the data center. Instead of constructing platform-specific high availability configurations for each application, you can pull under-utilized resources from any available system. The result is a predictable business continuity framework that is easy to manage and does not require continual monitoring. As all resources become freely and easily transferable across internal environments, every system becomes both primary and backup, based on internal application demand and external events that could disrupt the IT environment.
Using FabricServer for Business Continuity
For the first time, you can consolidate business continuity and disaster recovery planning in a heterogeneous IT environment with a single, central automated solution. FabricServer enables applications to share resources across platforms dynamically when unplanned outages or declines in availability occur. Instead of creating a decentralized business continuity framework that addresses each enterprise application separately, FabricServer's real-time infrastructure (RTI) creates a compute pool of resources from which applications can borrow resources when primary servers become unavailable.
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