Photo by Anthony Cramp (anthonycramp at Flickr)
It’s almost 4th of July and independence is in the air here in the States, however, that might not be the case for everyone. Do you ever feel like you’re at the mercy of your IT environment and your users? I’m guessing that the answer is overwhelmingly yes. If you’re like most IT professionals you probably spend a good deal of your time making sure that systems and apps are patched, up to date and optimized all the while you’re hoping that nothing in your environment fails.
To keep your environment in tiptop condition you may need to take servers out of commission from time to time in order to perform upgrades and maintenance tasks. Doing this can mean impacting users with downtime or coming in outside of business hours to get the job done. My guess is that the first option is not much of an option so the question is, how independent are you if you’re sacrificing your evening and weekends to keep things up and running?
Considering the possibility of failures, how many sleepless nights have you spent worrying about "what if" and how many all nighters have you pulled trying to recover from "when it does"? When things go wrong users come looking for answers and this can put any IT professional in a situation where you feel far from independent.
At VMware, we think virtualization is a great solution to help you get some of your independence back. Specifically the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) capabilities in VMware vSphere play a big part in helping you regain your IT independence with benefits ranging from:
- Knowing you can quickly and easily recover from a failure using integrated backup and recovery
- Gaining flexibility to perform middle-of-the-work-day upgrades with zero downtime for users
- Automation capabilities to keep up with the ebb and flow of dynamic, growing applications.
- Peace of mind to know that a hardware or SW failure will have little to no impact the availability of your critical services
- Ability to quickly and easily enable a multi-site disaster recovery solution, and test it so you know it’s going to work.
New to virtualization and VMware? This can be a lot to bite off in one blog post so here are a few links to get you more information on what you can do with virtualization and VMware:
- Webcast – Virtually Possible: The New Approach to Reducing IT Downtime (registration required)
- Podcast – Disaster Recovery for SMBs (mp3)
- Webpage – VMware Business Continuity Solutions
Already a VMware customer? First of all, thank you! If you’re looking to dig deeper into some of the concepts and capabilities to help improve your IT independence I recommend the following:
- Blog – Uptime section of the vSphere Blog
- Forums – VMware Backup and Recovery Community
- Forums – VMware vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) Community
If you're not yet a VMware customer and you want to try some of these capabilities yourself, check out the free 60 day evaluation of VMware vSphere.
Let us know in the comments below where you think virtualization can help you gain some IT independence.
