Whether you call it business continuity, disaster recovery--or just plain common sense--having in place a strategy for recovering data and applications in order to rapidly resume normal business operations has become a touchstone of good management. Indeed, redundancy, resiliency, and the ability to self-diagnose and heal ruptures in the networking fabric have become important selling points for a growing number of enterprise-system offerings.
The real problem, however, does not lie with the ability of individual components of a network to self-heal; the challenge lies with integrating the redundancy features of the dozens (in some cases hundreds) of systems that must work together in order to power enterprise operations.
The sheer complexity of heterogeneous networking environments creates holes in the business continuity safety net. Multi-generational systems have developed different technological approaches to resuming operational status creating single-points-of-failure that can significantly degrade the ability to recover.
For many large companies, and the mid-tier as well, the answer to this challenge has been to embark on aggressive consolidation and infrastructure-simplification programs. These strategies are not only designed to reduce the number of moving parts (or number of boxes) that must be in working order to maintain operations; they also are designed to aggregate and automate the way companies manage the consolidated environment.
Advances in virtualization technology, which allow multiple systems to be managed from a single console, have created major opportunities to simplify the business-recovery process.
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