Virtualization and disaster recovery: Best practices for disaster recovery planners
Looking at trends in disaster recovery (DR) planning from 2009, it has become clear that virtualization has become a critical consideration in DR planning and design. A 2009 DR survey from Symantec Corp. found that 64% of organizations are re-evaluating disaster recovery plans based on virtualization. But why?
The benefit of leveraging virtualization is obvious: more virtual servers at DR sites means reduced capital expense for disaster recovery as fewer physical servers need to be purchased, thus mitigating a major pain point in DR — the expense of idle assets.
However, capital cost reduction is only one of the benefits that virtualization brings to DR. Virtualization can also help to simplify the failover and recovery process, shorten recovery times, improve the likelihood of recovery, and enable more comprehensive DR testing. With this windfall of potential improvements, it makes sense that as virtualization becomes more widely adopted in production environments, DR planners are reexamining traditional disaster recovery approaches and practices.
See Virtualization and disaster recovery: Best practices for disaster recovery planners, by James Damoulakis for SearchDisasterRecovery.com.
Tags: CDP, continuous data protection, data replication, Disaster Recovery, virtualization
