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Clustering and virtualization, continuous data protection, and business-process monitoring are becoming integral pieces of progressive business-continuity plans. Three IT executives recently gathered to discuss these new data center technologies and how they're putting them to use for disaster-recovery purposes. Participating in this, second in an ongoing roundtable series, are Tony Adams, IT analyst, J.R. Simplot, in Boise, Idaho; Matthew Dattilo, vice president and CIO, PerkinElmer, in Wellesley, Mass.; and Rael Paster, head of collaboration services IT, Serono, Geneva.

Clustering, virtualization-what are your thoughts on how such emerging technologies can keep your servers running?

Adams: Our core disaster-recovery strategy is rapidly shifting away from tape-based restore of physical systems. Instead, we are working to virtualize as much of our x86 workload as possible and leverage long-distance [storage -area network]-to-[storage-area network] capabilities to maintain concurrent data at the disaster-recovery target site. With virtualization, we will be able to concurrently maintain exact copies of entire virtual machines at that site and be able to boot those virtual machines on arbitrary hardware. Virtualization completely eliminates the need to have a 1-to-1 inventory of identical physical hardware between data centers.

We accept that disaster-recovery operations can be degraded from a performance standpoint. Therefore we are able to budget lower total 'horsepower' for our recovery systems. This allows us to fully meet business functional requirements with lower CPU and storage costs.

Dattilo: For us, the emergence of these technologies has been exciting in that they're allowing us to significantly reduce the occurrence and severity of those hardware outages that would impact us in the 'several hour to a couple of days' range, depending on application.

While we've had these capabilities in our Unix environment for years, extending clustering and virtualization to our Windows/Intel-based environments has given us better choices of platforms, and better reliability in this environment. Lagging certification by applications providers has been a concern, but I don't see it as a long-term barrier.