More than ever Business Continuity is important

According to the Business Continuity Institute, 48% of businesses have had a significant IT failure in the past two years. Many of them never recover. In addition the Companies Act 2006, which will be fully ratified by 1st of October 2009, is a further example of legislation and regulations which have placed much more emphasis on the responsibilities of Directors to ensure that company systems and information are both protected and can be available in the event of a business interruption. It’s not just the Companies Act either. Many regulatory bodies are also implementing their own rules, procedures and guidelines. Our Scottish Building Society Case Study is a great example of how an organisation has used VMware to comply with the requirements of the Financial Services Authority.

How Does it Work?

In essence, VMware takes the operating system and the application(s) which reside on the Physical Server and turns them into a flat file, which it calls a “Virtual Machine”.

Virtual Machines, due to their simplicity and form are much easier to manage. VMware is therefore able to deliver exceptional Business Continuity through:

• Partitioning - Run multiple virtual machines with different operating systems on one physical server and divide system resources between Virtual Machines.
  
  
• Isolation - Fault and security isolation at the hardware level so a fault with one Virtual Machine will not affect others hosted on the physical server.
  
  
• Encapsulation - The entire state of the Virtual Machine can be saved to flat files. Moving and copying virtual machines is as easy as moving and copying files. This allows easy replication.
  
  
• Hardware Independence - Enables the provisioning or migration of any Virtual Machine to any similar or different physical server.
  
  
• Hot Migration - Moves running Virtual Machines between hosts while maintaining continuous availability of service. This enables dynamic load balancing.
  
  
• VMware DRS & HA - In the event of a Hardware failure, VMware dynamically re-apportions Virtual Machines between existing servers without interruption to service.
  
  
• Recovery - In the event of a site-wide failure or disaster, all servers and data can be recovered instantaneously by running via an off-site data centre, without any loss of service.