10 Items For Your Disaster Recovery Wish List

By ajohnson June 2, 2008 @ 9:58 am

In a TechRepublic article, author Rick Vanover provides a quick disaster recovery wish list.  I could just hear the legions of IT managers saying their “Amens and Halleluja’s” when reading Rick’s list. 

There are 2 items that especially rang true to me. 

Item number 3, “Everything starts with DR in mind” is probably the most challenging to accomplish. It’s one thing to think about disaster recovery during your nightly backup but it’s another thing to ensure all IT systems and policies comply with disaster recovery requirements.  To do so requires changing the mindset of your IT department as well as your executive team.  Without the support of the executive team, proper disaster recovery planning, implementation AND testing is nearly impossible to achieve. 

Item #10, “All things are possible for the small environment, too.”  Our mission at Simply Continuous is to create IT disaster recovery products and services for small and medium enterprises.  Rick accurately describes that technologies such as virtualization have enabled the small enterprise to achieve disaster recovery objectives.  However, we know that small IT departments are already taxed with doing more for less.  So adding one more technology like virtualization to their list to learn can be overwhelming and take IT resources away from other mission critical activities. 

For the companies who don’t have the resources to develop the domain expertise to successfully implement and maintain their virtual servers, Simply Continuous offers a managed service called AppAlive.  We’re experts at virtualization so you don’t have to be. 

The list is helpful when fine-tuning your existing plan or just getting started.  Compare your wish list with Rick’s by visiting http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=339.

Virtualization State of the Union by Alessandro Perilli

By ajohnson April 30, 2008 @ 10:49 am

I just finished watching a presentation by Alessandro Perilli at SYS-CON’s Virtualization Conference and Expo 2007 East.  It’s packed with useful info like the 9 challenges of virtualization and virtualization emerging trends.  I was especially interested hearing what Alessandro had to say about emerging trends which is at the end of the presentation.  According to Alessandro, over the next 3 years there will be an increase in application virtualization as well as an increase in vendors who provide SaaS and infrastructure leasing solutions.  As you can imagine, these trends made my ears perk up.

While Alessandro broke the emerging trends down into different features, Simply Continuous has bundled them all into one solution specifically designed to address IT disaster recovery needs. The solution is called AppAlive. It’s nice to know that we’re part of the emerging trend although I’m not sure “infrastructure leasing solutions” makes great marketing speak. There are a lot of businesses out there that would like to open a 2nd datacenter and utilize virtualization technology but don’t have the expertise or resources to maintain it. That’s why AppAlive and our other services make so much sense to companies who would like the benefits of a 2nd datacenter with virtualization but don’t want to significantly increase their IT costs.

To learn more about virtualization trends watch Alessandro’s State of the Union presentation.  I give it two thumbs up.

To learn how Simply Continuous can remotely protect and recovery your business applications, visit our AppAlive services page.  I give AppAlive two thumbs up but I’m clearly biased.