Vendors offer an abundance of products for easing do-it-yourself disaster recover.
Helpful tools for the do-it-yourself disaster-recovery enterprise
Brocade SilkWorm SAN routers – manage failover between remotely located and/or differing types of SANs.
HP Virtual Server Environment for HP-UX 11i – aimed at servers and blade servers; is one of the many tools HP offers for virtualizing servers.
HP Workload Manager – available for many operating systems, dynamically allocates CPU, memory and disk resources to meet application service-level objectives.
McData Eclipse or IPS families of multiprotocol SAN switches – manage failover between remotely located and/or differing types of SANs.
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (evaluation release available now, full release expected late 2004) – supports virtualization of Windows 2000 servers.
Solaris 10 – provides a variety of virtualization services for Sun boxes running Solaris applications, such as clustering (doesn’t support other operating systems).
Solaris 10 N1 Grid Containers – partitions Sun boxes so that they can run multiple instances of Solaris, even older and new versions simultaneously.
Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager software – provides automatic failover, load balancing and the like even between Sun servers in remote locations; can prioritize traffic from applications that cannot sustain delays.
Topspin Communications Topspin 360 server switch – creates virtualized clusters between servers of any operating system (even those running VMware) and/or between SANs for automatic failover, load balancing and the like. Useful for sites wanting to virtualize non-Windows servers.
Topspin VFrame – software for programming the 360 server switch with user-defined policies for load balancing, failover and the like. Supports VMware, Oracle Grid Computing and others.
VMware ESX Server or GSX Server – popular software for virtualizing Intel-based servers.
VMware P2V Assistant – eases conversion of physical servers onto virtual servers; can be helpful if moving from failed physical servers to back-up virtual servers.
VMware VMotion – takes an image of a VMware ESX or GSX virtual server for porting to another server running VMware virtualization software; intended for scheduled maintenance, not automatic failover from disasters.
