Ian Master, sales and marketing director UK, Double-Take Software tells Data Centre Management how a good business continuity strategy can aid your company's IT department.

Data replication solutions, which copy data in real time from one server to another to create a complete duplicate on a live backup system, provide very high levels of data protection and availability. However, data replication is just that; it only protects an application’s data, not the application itself. In the event of a disaster, system administrators have to hope all the application backups are valid and can be restored. If not, they’ll have no choice but to dig out and load the original installation disks, which isn’t always option. To overcome this, the more sophisticated data replication solutions provide byte-level replication for application system states so that administrators have the ability to provision an entire server at the touch of a button and keep business critical applications running.

This type of data replication, coupled with virtualisation solutions, can increase even further the ability to manage infrastructure more flexibly. Without data replication, the process of moving virtual machines is limited to the virtual infrastructure and sometimes only the same physical server where the technology is hosted. By combining data replication, that moves data and the application system state, with a combination of virtualisation, WAN accelerators, operational monitoring and security tools, provides the ability to protect and dynamically manage the entire data centre. It allows data centre managers to move servers “dynamically” to a different virtual machine where more processing power or disk space may be available. Additionally, administrators can replicate from physical to a virtual environment or vice versa, physical-to-physical or virtual-to-virtual, all while the end users are accessing the data.

Data centre managers are using dynamic infrastructures to move entire data centres without end users being aware, easing operational management and meeting the most stringent business continuity requirements. If a server is in need of maintenance, the data centre manager isn’t committed to a 2.00 am Sunday morning change control window just to tweak a configuration setting or perform a reboot. The operation of that server is dynamically moved to another without interruption, allowing the technician to take as long as needed to perform maintenance or repair.

Data centre managers don’t spend their contending with large-scale disasters. If you have the ability to move systems anywhere, anytime, for whatever reason, without interruption to users, you have exceeded a rather large piece of your company’s business continuity requirements and maximised data centre uptime. Dynamic infrastructures are providing the ability to restore business operations after a disaster not only to a functional level but also to the level of service that your end users expect, as well as providing the ability to manage data centre operations.