How Virtualization Changes the Game

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Business Continuity – How Virtualization Changes the Game

Current Challenges With Business Continuity

Try convincing a CEO or CFO to spend more money on a theoretical problem and you will most likely get a fast no for an answer. This is how too many companies look at business continuity from an IT angle. Unless a company has experienced serious pain from IT down time, or has the foresight to recognize the pending loss of employee productivity and revenue it can be a hard sell to upper management. Business continuity is a lot like selling insurance, and when people haven’t been exposed to extreme inconvenience or disaster its human nature to assume bad things either won’t happen to them, or the disaster won’t be as bad as what happened to the last guy.



Another challenge with business continuity is many organizations have become complacent thinking that regular backups are all that is required for a robust protection plan. Combined with assumptions that costs for a business continuity solution may be unreasonable, or the reality of day to day fire-fighting is getting in the way of long term planning can cause business continuity initiatives to take a significant amount of persistence to sell to the key decision makers.

Opportunities that enable Business Continuity

In today’s IT world there have been a significant number of new technologies and products enter the market over the last few years which enable solutions at prices which simply did not exist only just 3-5 years ago. Not long ago replicating data off site, or providing fast disk-to-disk backup was just too expensive to justify for most businesses. Today it’s possible to pick and choose replication technologies that leverage iSCSI or work at the host level to get data off site. Backing up to disk before going to tape allows for faster backup and restore times and can be combined with replication and data de-duplication to optimize backup and business continuity planes even further. Essentially a business continuity solution that cost $100K 3 years ago could be implemented for $20K (or less) today, the total feature set may not be as robust, although for most mid to small size businesses they just need enough features to get the job done.

With the advent of low cost NAS and iSCSI appliances you could start implementing business continuity planning well under five thousand dollars, allowing you to backup to disk, replicate data off site and finally archive to tape (or even eliminate tape altogether). Vendors such as StarWind Software make iSCSI software SAN which can turn any standard server into SAN storage. A StarWind iSCSI SAN can be used for primary storage or as fast backup to disk, and anywhere in the chain you can replicate data off site.

Along with recent advances in iSCSI storage, virtual servers are a critical cost reducer for business continuity plans. Virtualization allows DR scenarios to be tested during working hours, and enable hardware abstraction, eliminating the need to have identical hardware sitting on the shelf or at the DR site in case of failure.

Clouds and Continuity

Virtualization enables private Clouds, whether you own the cloud or you pay a managed services provider using a virtual environment keeps management and hardware costs down. Virtual servers allow lower total costs, permitting business continuity architectures that were previously only financially feasible to the most profitable companies. When using an iSCSI SAN with virtual servers you gain the benefits of using VMware features such as vMotion, HA and DRS which help provide resiliency within a site, while replicating data over iSCSI and using tools such as VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) allow site-to-site DR.

Virtualization the Business Continuity Game Changer

The sheer speed at which servers can be provisioned using virtualization, moved around between physical hardware resources and separate physical sites is a game changer. Virtualization is the layer most visible to the IT Manager and Administrators, providing the backbone upon which applications leverage for increased uptime and availability. But what allows virtualization to be so powerful is the SAN fabric. Without a SAN virtual servers become cumbersome and slow to migrate and manager. A SAN, whether Fiber Channel or iSCSI unlocks virtual servers from being tied to direct attached server disks.

Since the performance of iSCSI is more than adequate for most company’s needs, and the overall cost of iSCSI is far lower than FC storage most businesses are replicating data using a combination of iSCSI storage and/or host based replication agents. Even host based replication has dropped in price as the agents are now available in a variety of licensing schemes from a per VM license to pay per Hypervisor for unlimited VM licenses. At the end of the day, regardless of whether you use VMware, Hyper-V or another hypervisor, or you use a dedicated hardware SAN, or a build your own SAN with StarWind Software, the overall effect of virtualization as a game changer is undeniable.

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