How Virtualization Is Helping To Improve Disaster Recovery

Virtualization is changing both the business continuity and disaster recovery business and in many cases in a positive way. For instance with the entrance of Site Recovery Manager from VMware businesses can achieve what was once a very daunting task, backing up their critical data to an offsite or secondary location.

Taking into account that in the past it was necessary to purchase large amounts of hardware, not just for the main data center, but for the secondary fail-over site where the data is backed-up to.

This all added to increased costs of disaster recovery programs, and in many cases these solutions were out of reach for many companies due to the cost of additional electricity, hardware, and space.

With the help of server virtualization, and the added benefit of VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, many businesses are seeing an instant cost savings and ROI. They achieved this by utilizing virtualization to reduce the number of physical servers needed to run their business applications.

Almost instantly businesses found they had the hardware they needed to implement an offsite recovery system in a secondary location once they had reduced their need for as many physical servers.

The other added benefit to virtualization is the capability to test recovery plans, and recovery systems without affecting the production environment. In other words, no more costly down time for your systems while you are testing.

Here is a document on improving business continuity by utilizing VMware virtualization.

If you would like more information on business continuity or disaster recovery for your business please contact me here.