Business continuity for virtualized applications

[Eric_Hennessey1]

I speak with a lot of our customers, and a frequent topic of conversation is around virtualization. Just a few years ago, most I spoke with didn't have more than 20 to 30% of their applications virtualized. Now that figure is typically around 70% or higher, and most customers say their goal is to hit as close to 100% as they can. The common blocker to virtualizing, though, is concern over application availability.

It's for this reason that we developed our ApplicationHA solution a few years back to manage in-guest monitoring of applications and restart of the application in the event of a failure. More recently, we announced a new release of Veritas Cluster Server which allows users to create clusters of virtual machines, and failover an application to an already-running standby virtual machine.

Taneja Group has been watching the disaster recovery/business continuity space in the industry, and just recently put up a blog post about this very topic. I particularly liked this passage:

Now the final interesting angle I'll call out here is that Veritas Cluster Server actually speaks to the number one reason why customers pursue server virtualization too. If you remember what I said, I said this was TCO savings. The biggest factor in achieving TCO savings with virtualization is efficiency, achieved through the consolidation of workloads and higher VM density. Symantec has a message here too. The Symantec ApplicationHA and Veritas Cluster Server solutions deliver enhanced availability while sharing resources and enabling low utilization standby systems with less overhead than full clones running as standby servers, and other potential approaches.

Be sure to read the full reports linked at the bottom of the Taneja Group blog post. It's interesting stuff.