Recovery or Availability?
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Recovery or availability?
It's 4:00a.m. in California, but in London, it's the middle of the
working day. A CEO of a global corporation with offices in both
locations is relying on current information to finalize an acquisition.
Without warning, the power supply to the server room fails. The mail
and mobility servers are still physical, the backup is (was) online,
but there are virtual hosts in another part of the corporate campus and
power still flows there. This could be a career-defining moment.
With a lot of hard work, copious cups of coffee and a little luck, it only takes
a few hours to re-purpose systems and provide basic e-mail and
BlackBerry service. But in the lifetime of negotiation, hours seem like
weeks. The CEO has now had to concede on several sticking points and
wants to know why the investment in virtualization did not deliver the
continuity it promised.
What's worse is, this could have been avoided. Alongside the backup,
a replica copy of the relevant systems could have been held on the
virtual systems, which in turn could have been monitoring availability
of the e-mail and BlackBerry servers. It could have immediately
responded to the downtime by initiating an automated failover, allowing
users to carry on working without disruption.
Business continuity: It's all about the user experience
The best way for IT to ensure consistent business performance is
through the implementation of a solution that focuses on the business
need and user experience. Meeting that need should be part of the
virtual deployment planning, and drive the selection of virtual
infrastructure and extended management tools. This means looking at all
aspects of the virtual deployment and the source of outage threats.
The reasons for outages vary. They may include data loss, server
failure, application failure, network failure, planned downtime,
application performance degradation and corruption, or a complete site
outage (disaster). It's a fact of life that IT outages will happen;
therefore, a critical goal should be that when an outage occurs, it
should not result in business disruption and downtime. Users should be
able to continue operating as if nothing has happened, thus delivering
on the promise of consistent business performance. During
virtualization projects, a critical look should be taken at possible
failure points and the ability of the management tools to detect such
failures.
Blending physical and virtual deployments to accelerate availability
By combining the best of replication, application monitoring and
automation with virtual infrastructure, users can significantly enhance
their business continuity capabilities. Virtual hosts running less
critical systems can be used to provide a business-critical failover server without risking existing systems in any way.
For example, in the event of a database crisis, it's just a question
of making sure the failover server is available for users to connect to
and carry on working. Finding a combination of replication, monitoring
and seamless failover software that can manage the process is all that
is required. This architecture can work locally for high availability
and remotely for disaster recovery. It can even be extended so that the
virtual host becomes an availability hub supporting multiple, mission-critical applications, perhaps on a dedicated virtual host.
Andrew Barnes is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Neverfail.
Andrew joined Neverfail in March 2007, bringing extensive experience in
marketing, product management and pre-sales from his 25 years in the
software industry. In this current role, Andrew is responsible for
Neverfail's branding, marketing, product management and Web presence.
Andrew most recently served as VP of Marketing for a European-based
software company and has held a variety of senior positions with
companies such as KVS, Sun and Platinum Technology.
Previously, Andrew worked as Global Director of Marketing for KVS
Inc. where he was responsible for all aspects of marketing and grew the
customer base tenfold until the company's acquisition by Veritas (now
Symantec). Prior to KVS, Andrew was Northern Europe Marketing Manager
for iPlanet and Product Marketing Manager for Forte Software (acquired
by Sun Microsystems). In addition, Andrew served as the European
Product Manager for Platinum Technology where he led a multinational
team responsible for the launch and sales enablement of Platinum
Infrastructure management products across Europe. He can be reached at ABarnes@neverfailgroup.com.
Andrew Barnes is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Neverfail.
Andrew joined Neverfail in March 2007, bringing extensive experience in
marketing, product management and pre-sales from his 25 years in the
software industry. In this current role, Andrew is responsible for
Neverfail's branding, marketing, product management and Web presence.
Andrew most recently served as VP of Marketing for a European-based
software company and has held a variety of senior positions with
companies such as KVS, Sun and Platinum Technology.
Previously, Andrew worked as Global Director of Marketing for KVS
Inc. where he was responsible for all aspects of marketing and grew the
customer base tenfold until the company's acquisition by Veritas (now
Symantec). Prior to KVS, Andrew was Northern Europe Marketing Manager
for iPlanet and Product Marketing Manager for Forte Software (acquired
by Sun Microsystems). In addition, Andrew served as the European
Product Manager for Platinum Technology where he led a multinational
team responsible for the launch and sales enablement of Platinum
Infrastructure management products across Europe. He can be reached at ABarnes@neverfailgroup.com. 
