The new business continuity Downtime no more Remembering every instant in time The MPLS answer IT monitoring with a twist Your opinion: Talk it up The new data center by the numbers Awesome in Austin Filling the app gap

When MLT Vacations scrapped its pricey Sun hardware for a cluster of IBM Linux blade servers to support its Oracle database, it expected to see savings. But the company got something even more: a database environment it truly could depend on 24/7.

That was "icing on the cake," says Chris Corona, manager of systems services for the online provider of travel packages, in Edina, Minn.

Emerging clustering and virtualization technologies can bring high-end capabilities to low-priced, standards-based servers that have been pumped up with performance and reliability improvements. In turn, IT managers get a wider choice when it comes to mapping business  continuity plans. Many, like Corona, are finding that the tools they've selected to make the data center more dynamic - and, interestingly, to cut costs - are creating a more reliable environment to support critical-business processes. Should a failure occur, applications that aren't tied to the hardware on which they run easily can be moved from one virtual server to another or within a cluster.

"When you thought about business continuity, you used to think replicated servers, replicated data and separate physical machines," says Joe Clabby, an analyst with Summit Strategies. "Now you think resource pool."

At International Truck and Engine, a Warrenville, Ill., manufacturer, IT Manager Barry Naber keeps applications running smoothly using VMware's VMotion. This tool lets users move virtual machines among physical servers.

"We brought VMware in for server consolidation and realized it's much bigger than that. It's also business continuity," Naber says. "With VMotion, if one server within our VMware farm is getting hit more heavily than the others, we can move users over to another server unbeknownst to them and allow the application to function without having to take the server down. Before, end users would have experienced an outage."

International Truck and Engine has about 150 VMware partitions running on less than a dozen servers. The company has avoided about $1 million in hardware costs, Naber says.