Tom Brand, Virtualisation Practice Lead at GlassHouse Technologies (UK) discusses how virtualisation can form part of a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan.

About eight years ago I created my first virtual machine and I remember thinking about the implications this technology could have on the IT industry as a whole. It turned out to be the start of a very exciting journey and since then virtualisation technologies have developed at an extraordinary rate.

Throughout my time developing and consulting on virtualisation solutions, one thing has remained constant; virtualisation is seen as the key enabler for organisations to achieve their goals of reducing the cost of running IT infrastructures while improving their levels of availability. Now, at least half of all the customers I speak with are looking to virtualisation solutions to significantly improve their business continuity strategies as well as reduce their data centre footprint.

At its very core, virtualisation offers three key features that can greatly enhance most business continuity strategies:

1. The ability to provide high availability, both local and remote, across a far broader range of service tiers.

2. The abstraction of services (compute, storage, network and application) from the underlying infrastructure, enabling greater levels of flexibility.

3. Through consolidation and the resulting reduction in physical infrastructures, organisations no longer have the capital and operational burden of running expensive Disaster Recovery (DR) sites.

Server virtualisation has been around for some time and many companies take the inherent local high availability features for granted. However, the ability to take hundreds of legacy, often poorly protected servers and move them all to a fully clustered system at little additional cost and in no time at all, is also of huge benefit. On top of this, virtualisation also allows virtual servers to be backed-up as a complete image. This further reduces the risk to the business, particularly for those services that are no longer supported by the vendor or the internal IT developers are long gone – there are plenty of these cases around!

In the early days, before many of the new toolsets became available, the ability to replicate many virtual servers from one site to another was great but the recovery process was complex. It involved a significant number of manual processes or a very complex set of scripts that required modification every time a change was made. Today, as greater numbers of automation tools hit the market, DR is becoming a ‘push the green button’ solution requiring fewer and fewer administrators. This level of automation simply wouldn’t be possible without virtualisation technologies.

Taking this one step further, the days of having specific DR strategies for unplanned disasters could be a thing of the past as more and more technologies have business continuity solutions built in by default. Cloud storage solutions, based on virtualisation technologies, now enable data to be made available any time any place, regardless of where the critical failure happened.

At the desktop

Virtualisation at the desktop level also enables organisations to provide end user access any time, any place - removing the need for the old-school approach of paying for standby office locations.

 I spoke to a number of CTOs after the snow storms in the UK earlier this year and a number of them said productivity was unaffected because people were able to work from home accessing exactly the same desktop, including their IP telephony, from a VDI solution. As the workforce becomes more and more mobile, workspace strategies must also develop including their levels of availability. People simply won’t tolerate down-time, particularly if the competition is running business as usual.

So virtualisation solves all our business continuity problems, right? The simple answer, as with anything virtual, is that it’s not that simple! As part of any Business Continuity strategy organisations must understand the pros and cons of virtualisation solutions and ensure their service tiers are mapped accordingly to the features provided by those technologies. For example, just being able to replicate servers and data from A to B ‘en mass’ is great, but if critical data on one particular server is corrupt on recovery, it’s no good to anyone.

There is no doubt that virtualisation technologies are significantly improving the ability for IT organisations of all sizes to provide better levels of service back to the business without the significant levels of investment often required. In the future, perhaps business continuity will actually become a thing of the past as all services will be expected to run at 100% availability regardless of their size and complexity.

Tom Brand, is the Virtualisation Practice Lead at Consultancy GlassHouse Technologies (UK) and a Contributor to SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk