Virtualisation is widely regarded as thebest way to build datacentres, because it requires
fewer servers, which helps lower IT costs and energy use. Now the
technology is makinginroads into disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery normally involves establishing a dedicated
datacentre which goes live when the main datacentre fails. However,
the servers and IT infrastructure at the disaster recovery site are
idle most of the time. Virtualisation allows IT departments to run
other workloads on this IT infrastructure when the disaster
recovery facility is not required.
Last week,
VMware launched vSphere, its cloud operating system, which aims
to link business' internal IT infrastructure with IT infrastructure
available from a service provider though the cloud. One of the
benefits of vCloud is that it enables businesses to support
business continuity and disaster recovery, without requiring a
back-up datacentre. Instead, the back-up site can be hosted within
a service provider's datacentre using virtualisation.
Stephanie Balaouras, principal analyst, IT infrastructure and
operations at Forrester Research, says virtualisation has made it
easier for large enterprises to support disaster recovery. "If you
wanted to be able to recover [from an outage] in a matter of
minutes or hours, the service provider would previously charge
millions of dollars." This is due to the complexity of the
dedicated IT infrastructure required. Thanks to virtualisation she
says, "IT departments can replicate physical or virtual machines
through the cloud. This costs half as much as dedicated disaster
recovery service."
Alstrom, which specialises in transport and energy, has been
using VMware since 2003, in a bid to lower IT costs by using
virtualisation to consolidate servers. The company has moved server
infrastructure including its Windows Active Directory, Alteris
patch management server, Lotus Notes e-mail system and some of its
SAP servers onto VMware. "We now have a big project to offload
disaster recovery into the cloud, using VMware," says Rob Jones,
director of technical architecture at Alstom.
Restaurant chain Pret a Manger is another company using
virtualisation to lower the cost of disaster recovery. The company
is using an internal cloud service from Ioko, based on VMware,
which allows it to selectively move internally hosted services to
one of ioko's shared cloud platforms or vice-versa. Pret uses
Ioku's infrastructure to run line of business applications. Data is
replicated over a 1gbps link to its Victoria-based head office,
which is used as a disaster recovery site.
However, there are a number of barriers to using virtualisation
for disaster recovery. Phil Dawson, a research director at Gartner,
says, "Your software licensing contracts may not cover running a
disaster recovery site hosted by a service provider."
The security policy of service providers that offer disaster
recovery in the cloud may be lower than the security policy for the
business. Peter Wood, chief of operations at penetration testing
company First Base Technologies, warns, "When you use a third party
provider you cannot control security."
But if the security and licensing issues can be overcome,
cloud-based disaster recovery using virtualisation can be a viable
alternative to costly back-up datacentres.