Virtualisation And Business Resilience Explored

If there is one component that has revolutionised business continuity, it has to be virtualization technologies. 

In this article, Steve Gold looks at how virtualization can be engineered to go hand in hand with increased IT systems resilience - and how the technology can go a long way towards supporting the Holy Grail of 100 per cent systems uptime... 

Although cost is a major driver in most enterprise's migration to a virtualized environment, there are increasing arguments in favour of the technology, thanks to the increase in IT systems resiliency against downtime and other system failures. 

Conventional data centre best practice argues against operating a single resource for an enterprise, due to the risks of power outages, floods and other disasters that can bring a data resource to its knees in relatively short order. 

Most enterprises, in fact, usually operate two or more data centres, so as to give themselves better resilience against serious downtime, but a virtualized IT environment also allows managers to spread the required IT resources across multiple sites and systems with relative ease. 

In fact, there are signs that using a distributed virtual approach to an enterprise's IT resources can actually go a long way towards meeting the business continuity plans of even the most paranoid of company boards. 

And, whilst there will probably never be a replacement for a bank's 24x7 disaster recovery centre, for example, using a secure virtualized environment can often reduce the requirement for a disaster recovery IT resource for many companies. 

In an April 2009 study carried out amongst 450 IT professionals on both sides of the Atlantic, expenditure on virtualized storage systems was predicted to continue rising in the next three years, whilst expenditures for conventional storage was seen as stagnating.