Living Dangerously with Virtual Machine Mismanagement
Virtualization is a business continuity answer to the vulnerabilities and foibles of physical servers. By spreading applications virtually and horizontally across vertical stacks of computing power, service can be ensured even if one stack goes down and the same application elsewhere picks up the slack. In principle, that’s fine – as long as IT administrators […]
Disaster Recovery as a Service and the New ‘Not Invented Here’ Syndrome
The ‘not invented here’ syndrome was something that forward-looking corporations set out to beat about 20 years ago. If a different product or service could be more cost-effectively bought in rather than being designed and manufactured in-house, then it was bought in. The challenge was to overcome misplaced pride and internal turf wars, where being […]
Disaster Recovery, Horses for Courses and Other Metaphors
Just think how exciting the world of disaster recovery has become. What used to be exclusively tape storage has branched out into all kinds of disk storage, virtual snapshots, deduplication and cloud object storage. That’s great for DR managers, right? Not so fast. One of the central elements of disaster recovery is risk mitigation, which […]
A Startling Idea in Disaster Recovery (and Nothing to do with Technology)
Ask people where the next surprise will be in disaster recovery and they may well point to technology, the weather or legislation. While all of these areas should be taken into consideration, there’s another one that is vital to good DR management. It’s people. Perhaps because it’s so obvious, disaster recovery plans sometimes gloss over […]
Balancing Acts and the CIO – the Blondini of the Organisation?
150 years ago the Great Blondini, the world-famous tightrope walker, performed incredible feats of balance and daring in his aerial ambulation above Niagara Falls. While today’s Chief Information Office doesn’t always hold crowds breathless with excitement in quite the same way, he or she has a balancing act to get right too. How much detail […]
Making Virtualisation in IT an Advantage, not a Risk
The big selling point about virtualisation, at least in disaster recovery terms, is the power it gives to handle single points of IT failure. The idea is to distribute applications the right way over a number of servers; then if one physical machine crashes, another one should be available to ensure that applications can continue […]