Contributed article by Andrew Barnes of Neverfail

Imagine:  You’re in unfamiliar territory, driving down a side road you don’t know, possibly running late for a very important meeting and a traffic accident has blocked the road one mile ahead. But you’re relaxed as you have the latest, state-of-the art satellite navigation system to rely on. It scans for a new route, taking into account potential traffic bottlenecks and confirms you’ll make the meeting with a few minutes to spare if you turn left half a mile ahead and re-route via the back roads.

Safe in the knowledge you’ll make the meeting you start to think about what might have been.

Up to now you’ve seen your navigation device more as a gadget than a vital information service; a toy to keep you amused on long journeys. If it failed, or was stolen, then it would hardly be a catastrophe. Your car would still work, the roads would still be there and you’d still get where you were going.   

But what if it had broken right at that point? How would the situation be different?

Without that little hub of car trip management you’d be scrambling around in your glove compartment looking for an old map. While finding the right page and trying to identify exactly where you were, you fail to concentrate on the way ahead, risking an accident. Before you’re able to work out an alternate route, that traffic accident ahead brings you to a halt. It’s too late. Failure of a $200 device, and your backup option of an out of date road map, results in total failure. The important meeting is missed and the business lost. If only you’d invested in a back-up navigation system for just this circumstance.

By now you probably think I’ve gone mad.  What’s this got to do with virtualization?

Well, think about it. The important meeting is a business deadline and delivering the results depends on a series of on-line applications that that you’d recently virtualized. A critical component is about to fail. The service level you’d come to expect won’t be delivered. 

Virtualization solutions like VMware and vCenter deliver important services. They take care of you and your users. They keep your applications running on the right road and alert you when there is a resource bottleneck. They also help you identify where there is spare capacity and use capabilities like vMotion to move the application to another server, so the services continue to be delivered seamlessly.

Take the analogy a little further. What if, at that very moment, the old computer running vCenter Server fails? You will be driving blind. By the time you’ve found and recovered from backup the critical application will have failed, and services not delivered.  The business is demanding blood, having spent a great deal of money on your promises that virtualization was the future.

If only you’d invested in an automated failover system for vCenter Server. All would be well. If vCenter goes down, nothing actually stops – same as your satellite navigation system.  But, things can go wrong pretty quickly. And traditional backup systems – like the physical map, don’t work nearly as well.

Andrew Barnes is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Neverfail (www.neverfailgroup.com), which provides business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for the mid-market.