Virtualization's Role in Business Continuity

By Stephanie Jordan
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While researching the story Plugging In to Continuous Availability, I spoke with a few business continuity experts and one of the topics of interest was how and if virtualization fits into continuous availability.

Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail Group stressed how important it is to understand what is happening inside the virtual machine. “There is no doubt that virtualization brings benefits to business continuity because it is like clustering,” he says. “If you are prepared to move your messaging system to run on a virtual machine and you have the budget to create a virtual cluster connected by storage area networks, and have the virtualization expertise to do that, then what you’ve got is a very reliable stable platform protecting against hardware failures. Where things start to fall back a little, is if let’s say in your Exchange system, ActiveSync fails, crashes. Virtualization does not deal with that. It doesn’t know what is going on within the application. The result is that users can no longer send email.”

Where virtualization can really play a hand is converting from physical to virtual machines, especially if extra hardware is not available in an emergency. Eric Pitcher, VP technology strategy for the recovery management and data modeling business unit of CA, gives this example: “You are backing up a physical messaging server, and one day it burns up, or whatever. Maybe you don’t have spare hardware standing around, instead, you can install a virtual environment very fast. You can download VMware, or any other virtualization vendor, quickly and easily, then you can restore from our physical back ups to a virtual environment, and we will convert it for you.”

Pitcher observes that one of the problems with RTO (recovery time objective) is not just putting the data back, but also getting the infrastructure ready. “It could take two or three days to get the hardware ordered, bring back the environment and get it up and running. Well now if I can use virtualization as a disaster recovery benefit, and maybe sometime in the future I might go back to a physical environment if I decide.”

CA announced last month that the U.S. Air Force 45th Space Wing (45th SW), which manages launch operations for Department of Defense space programs, has saved at least $180,000 USD in hardware and support costs by virtualizing its IT infrastructure, using CA ARCserve Backup to protect data across physical and virtual servers and CA XOsoft Replication for IP cloud-based replication to migrate data from physical to virtual machines.

According to the case study, the 45th SW was faced with the usual issues of having to regularly replace and upgrade hardware and software, rising electricity and cooling costs, and an annual doubling of storage needs. To meet these challenges, Computer Sciences Raytheon (CSR), the Eastern Range Technical Services contractor for the 45th SW, executed a multi-phased approach to bring the infrastructure under control — consolidating the storage into a SAN at each of the two primary locations at Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station — that reduced 60 physical servers to four, including 40 virtual machines.

The project team stated, “The usual methods of converting physical to virtual servers either didn’t work or didn’t completely meet the project objectives.” They then discovered that using CA XOsoft for IP-based replication was simple and effective, allowing them to replicate from old to new systems regardless of the vendor, class of system or type of processor, noting it was far less expensive than using hardware-based replication.

Published September 16, 2009