His numerous exploits included the first successful expedition to the South Pole and the first trans-Arctic flight across the North Pole, yet legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen did not think of himself as an "adventurer."

"Adventure is just bad planning," he once said.  Biographers say Amundsen was well-regarded among his peers for his ability to minimize risk through meticulous preparation, exceptional organizational skills and innovative survival techniques. Mike Carter, eGroup principal consultant, says these are the same qualities businesses should draw upon to ensure that a disaster doesn't turn operations into an adventure.<!--more-->

"It's crucial that organizations incorporate a comprehensive, proven disaster recovery plan into their overall business strategy to help ensure the recovery of data and applications with the least amount of impact to operations," said Carter. "Virtualization technology can dramatically minimize risk by automating the disaster recovery process and ensuring that it is executed rapidly, correctly and cost-efficiently."

<strong>Keeping it Simple</strong>

VMware's virtualization platform makes significant improvements to disaster recovery readiness by creating hardware independence. In a non-virtualized environment, data replication must occur between like equipment. By abstracting the operating system from the hardware layer, VMware allows organizations to replicate asymmetrically - that is, without having to provide a matching host or disk at the disaster recovery site.

"With virtualization, you don't have to worry about matching your hardware configuration, and you eliminate the difficulties of recovering your operating system and application installation on different hardware," said Carter. "Virtualization turns everything into data stored in just a few files on disk. Protecting a complete system is just a matter of protecting a few files using your backup or replication software. The files that make up a virtual machine can be recovered to any hardware without requiring any changes because virtual machines are hardware independent."

Traditional disaster recovery in a non-virtualized environment also requires many manual, complex steps to allocate recovery resources, perform operating system, application and data recovery, and validate that systems are ready for use. These manual processes leave organizations exposed to significant risk of extended downtime because they are tough to set up, time-consuming to maintain and extremely difficult to test. As a result, only a subset of important systems can be adequately protected.

VMware has addressed those issues with the introduction of Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a workflow engine that automates disaster recovery processes. SRM works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure and VMware VirtualCenter, and is tightly integrated with storage replication software from leading storage vendors. As a result, SRM can guide users through the process of connecting to the disaster recovery site and to just about any storage replication software in use, and makes it easy to map production resources to the corresponding resources at a recovery site.

SRM also provides an intuitive interface to help customers create recovery plans for different failover scenarios and different parts of their infrastructure. Organizations can specify virtual machines to be suspended or shut down to free resources for recovery. They can also specify the order in which virtual machines are powered on, set user-defined scripts to execute automatically, and determine where to pause the recovery process if necessary.

<strong>Testing, Testing</strong>

Having a recovery plan is an important step, but just as important is ensuring that the plan is reliable. Traditional recovery plans are often unreliable because they are hard to test, difficult to keep up to date, and depend upon correct execution of complex manual recovery processes. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 IT managers, nearly one-third reported that their tests failed to meet recovery time objectives. Human error was the leading reported cause of failure. Furthermore, nearly half of the respondents said they are reluctant to test their plans due to disruption to the business and lack of resources.

SRM greatly simplifies and improves the testing process. It automates the creation of a non-disruptive and isolated testing environment on the recovery site by leveraging the snapshot capabilities of storage arrays and connecting virtual machines to the user's isolated testing network. It automates the execution of the recovery plan to be used in an actual failover and cleans up the testing environment once testing is complete. Test results are saved for viewing and export at any time. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.

"Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations," said Carter. "By eliminating the error-prone manual steps in the typical recovery process, VMware removes the most common causes of failure during recovery and ensures that recovery procedures will be consistently executed as intended."

A spirit of adventure can lead to innovation in the business world, but when it comes to disaster planning, there is no place for uncertainty or risk. A disaster recovery solution must be as clear and predictable as possible because there is little room for error when mission-critical data and applications are at stake. VMware's portfolio of virtualization solutions helps take the guesswork out of disaster recovery through hardware independence and automation. It's a solution organizations should explore.