Rethinking Business Continuance: Driving data availability up and costs down

Almost every business organization understands that successful operations depend on the continuous availability of its applications. Most companies rely on internal applications – ranging from enterprise resource planning to payroll systems – to keep the wheels of the organization turning. They also depend on external-facing applications for everything from selling products to their customers to automating the supply chain with suppliers and partners. The failure of any of these business-critical applications could be catastrophic to a company.

The causes of downtime are numerous. Top-of-mind causes include fire and natural  disasters such as loods, tornadoes and hurricanes. More unexpected are causes such as power system and cooling failures. But more unexpected still are the failures that are not true disasters. A fire in another part of the building can cause smoke and water damage in the best-protected data centre. Human error can range from the throwing of the wrong circuit breaker to an accidental discharge of fire-suppression material. When a failure occurs, its scope can range from a system to a rack, from a room to a floor and
from a building to a complete site.

A comprehensive business continuity solution includes not only the capacity to recover operations after a major disaster, but also the capacity to remain on line during minor disruptions. Server virtualization software has brought great relief to IT organizations searching for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions with a low cost of entry. Regrettably, the same organizations that choose server virtualization as part of their HA and DR strategy often overlook the requirement for a shared storage solution that provides adequate support for the HA and DR features their server virtualization solution offers. Fortunately, HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions provide cost-effective support for server virtualization as well as integrated, no-cost HA and DR storage solutions that are arguably superior to those available at extra cost from other SAN vendors.

Read more by downloading the white paper from HP.