Business Continuity

Did you Know ...
Only 31% of CIO’s surveyed rate their plans as extremely or very effective
(IDG)

40% of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours
(Gartner)

Surveys indicate that every year, 1 in 500 data-centers experience a severe disaster and over 60% incur significant financial damage from systems failures. However, only 31% of CIO’s rate their disaster recovery plans as extremely or very effective and 73% plan to make changes to their disaster recovery plans. As a result, disaster recovery spending continues to grow and is projected to reach $5.2 billion in 2007.
Disaster recovery describes the plans and processes used for recovery of important services after a major disruption such as one caused by power outages, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.

Satisfactory disaster recovery for x86 systems has traditionally been difficult or impossible for organisations because it has been slow, unreliable, and expensive. However, VMware Infrastructure makes viable disaster recovery possible, allowing organisations to have disaster recovery plans that are fast, reliable, and affordable. It makes this possible by providing true hardware independence, dramatically reduced hardware requirements, and far easier testing. In fact, improved disaster recovery is one of the top three benefits that customers look to VMware Infrastructure to provide and over 60% of VMware customers use virtualisation for disaster recovery today.

Key Properties of Virtualisation that Benefit DR

Harware independence

Run a virtual machine on any server without modification

• No identical hardwarerequirements for DR
• Eliminate lock-step change control
• Faster DR provisioning
• Waterfall (redeploy) old servers to DR
• Fund your DR costs

Encapsulation

Encapsulate entire systems in files

• Simpler and faster process for replication of system state, application and data
• DR testing process simplified
• More reliable backup and replication
• Be a part of shared storage
• Faster provisioning of DR machines

Partitioning

Run multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single physical server

• Consolidation & Containment
• Boost utilisation
• Fewer servers needed
• Lowers hardware costs up to 70%
• Lowers operating costs up to 60%
• Fund your DR investment plan

Isolation:

Each virtual machine is isolated from other virtual machines on the same server

• Simplify DR Test; Easy to set-up and provision DR test sandbox; Dual use
• Network isolation of “live” and “”test”
• Reliable and non-disruptive DR test
• No need for additional hardware
• Increase DR coverage for all apps
• Resource pooling for load balance