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There are probably as many approaches to data protection and disaster recovery as there are types of disasters that might befall your data centre. Figuring out which approach is best for your data centre – from a technical, operational and financial outlook – is enough to keep you up all night. Software glitches, hardware failures, human error – even site-wide outages – threaten your data centre. And don’t forget about those governmental compliance requirements.
Whatever reasons drive you to protect your data, HP and VMware have a proven, flexible solution that prepares your data to survive and recover from almost any calamity. Let’s look at three common disaster recovery problems and how the right solution can help you address them.
Problem 1: Recovery from disasters is too slow and requires operating system and application installations or bare metal restores.
Together, HP and VMware allow organisations to quickly recover from disasters because virtual machines eliminate the need to perform operating system (OS) and application installations or bare metal restores. Virtual machines can be replicated to alternative locations and brought online in just minutes or hours.
Problem2: Your current approach to the disaster recovery system requires a dedicated identical disaster recovery server.
Rather than purchase duplicate hardware, you can recover your applications and data onto other virtual machines, repurposing underutilised servers instead of using dedicated physical servers. Disaster recovery costs are reduced by leveraging the flexibility of hardware independent virtual machines that can run on any system, including repurposed servers. The disaster recovery process is simplified because the hardware independence of virtual machines eliminates complications that arise from hardware differences between primary and recovery sites.
Problem3: Keeping recovery data in sync with production data is a constant struggle – if we have to recover from a disaster, our most current data is at risk.
Your business-critical data needs to be synchronised between the physical and the virtual – and kept that way. With HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring for Virtual Machines, continuous real-time replication – at the byte-level – keeps data up-to-date, and the included automatic failover capabilities allow application availability, timely backup and a clear path to disaster recovery.
Building your HP-VMware disaster recovery solution
The first step is a strong foundation, like the HP BladeSystem. HP BladeSystem integrates the essential elements of the data centre – computing, storage, network, power and management – into a modular, self-optimising unit. These modules are virtualised to pool and share all resources and connections, increasing utilisation, lowering costs and providing the flexibility and control to quickly meet changing conditions and requirements.
VMware ESX Server extends the benefits of HP BladeSystem by providing a dynamic, scalable virtual machine environment to host replicas of the physical servers you choose to protect. This means that on one or more HP BladeSystem server blades – located in the same enclosure, the same data centre or on opposite sides of the globe – multiple unmodified Microsoft® Windows® operating systems and their applications run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources. This method protects your applications, increases hardware utilisation, decreases the data centre “footprint”, and eases management tasks.
HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management pack (VMM) provide an integrated management environment to not only replicate the servers to the VMware virtual machines, but also to allow you to manage the virtual machines – no matter where they are located – from a single SIM console just like any physical HP server.
Microsoft and Windows are U. S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Windows Vista is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
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