Storage > Disaster RecoveryEssentials

Human resources consulting firm Chandler Macleod Group has revitalised its IT operations by using virtualisation to build virtual disaster recovery and consolidate its server infrastructure.

In our daily lives we try to protect ourselves from the worst. We buy insurance for our cars, homes and health and we safeguard personal information. Shouldn't business owners and IT managers treat their networks and critical infrastructure the same way?

The NSW Fire Brigades' has adopted virtualisation for its new disaster recovery strategy and in the process moved its core services from Windows to SUSE Linux.

A new disaster recovery vendor is taking the concept of an airplane black box and adapting it to the enterprise to create a new way of protecting crucial data from natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

Virtualization is becoming increasingly important in the datacenter as a way to respond quickly to the varying server demands. Depending on time of day and day of the week, as well as events in progress and many other factors, loads on any given machine may vary by factors of 100 or 1,000 or more. Giving a server more or less computing power, running multiple instances of the same server for load balancing purposes, or allowing failover from one virtual instance to another are increasingly important capabilities.

A fully virtualised fail-over disaster recovery environment that has been purpose-built for federal government customers is set to go live later this month.

Here's a tricky question: Could your company operate during a flu pandemic?

Last November, a fire broke out in one of the buildings on ISTA Pharmaceuticals' main campus, forcing about 50 employees to move to another location on the property. After the building's sprinklers kicked in, the entire network had to be shut down because the water threatened the equipment carrying the company's inbound data traffic.