High availability for full server protection has never been more important. As virtualization and blade technologies continue to rapidly be adopted, IT infrastructures are becoming smaller and more efficient. Doing more with less has been a centralized theme for IT managers this past year but “less” doesn’t mean ignoring backup and recovery strategies. If anything high availability solutions are also being consolidated, easier to deploy and much more cost effective. Most everyone has seen the availability curve describing the cost of a low recovery point (RPO) or time objective (RTO) using some medium like tape can be low cost but not effective to achieve high availability for business critical applications. As the RTO and RPO window shrinks typically the cost increases to achieve rapid five 9 availability. This is no longer the case and if anything the paradigm is shifting and becoming the exact opposite because the cost of downtime or the length of time it takes to recover is more expensive than preventing it.

The Backup Conundrum
A few years ago backup and recovery was relatively straight forward. IT managers had one server that ran one critical application, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server or BlackBerry Enterprise server, and the process was to backup that one server and have the ability to recover in the event of a failure. Today, data centers have consolidated locations, servers and virtual infrastructure where one physical server may be running multiple applications and virtual machines that service an entire organization. Should that one server or power to that server rack fail, the impact is exponential because of this multi-functional architecture. In this scenario, tape will not be sufficient to restore operations as fast as required. So although a consolidated virtual infrastructure is much more efficient the cost of downtime has increased 10 fold from original ROI studies because the impact is greater.

Now add to the mix the combination of operating systems and virtual platforms. The high availability solution for Windows isn’t the same for Linux, or VMware vSphere to a simple physical server. Or is it?

Unifying Your High Availability Solution for all Platforms
The answer is yes! It is and can be this simple to use a unified solution to provide high availability as well as the same backup and recovery strategies to all combinations for infrastructure, cross platform as well as hardware. Some of the misconceptions of recovery are if a certain brand of server fails that an exact copy of that server is required in order to recover. This is also false; servers can be recovered to any server platform no matter what the hardware vendor is. This is referred to as hardware independent full server recovery. The process involves the backup and recovery of the system state of the server, applications as well as associated data. And some really smart engineers in Indianapolis, Indiana figured out how you can eliminate hardware dependencies and recovery cross hardware platforms. This same innovative technology can be utilized to provide high availability between virtual platforms or even between virtual and physical infrastructure.

Here are some benefits of using a unified high availability and backup and recovery solution for all architecture combinations.

- Continuous data replication over any distance and over any hardware, physical or virtual platform provides rapid recovery options for current copy of your data, applications and OS.
- Replicate full server workloads to any data center or disaster recovery location, over standard IP networks, for maximum protection and high availability.
- Implement failover clusters without shared storage or geographic limitations - eliminating the single point of failure and giving you the freedom to locate cluster nodes wherever you want.

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