In a departure from our regular technical content, we will be featuring a new guest blog series on Connect. Please help us in welcoming Crash - the star of the Data Center Down! video.

I went to Oracle Open World and all I did was lie on the floor for three days.

Hey now, don’t go pointing those blasters at me. You’d feel the same if just weeks ago you were forced into attempting to set your own Felix Baumgartner-style record by leaping from an 18-story building. I mustered all my strength to pass my wisdom to my second-in-command, the other data center waiting with the crew on the roof. Did you see the way opened his rack when tech specialist Fahima Zahir was around? Shameless flirt. He’s been like that since we were microchips.

Anyway, the San Francisco event made the ideal venue for my debut, although I was sorely disappointed that I didn’t have the chance to pick Larry...

Watch this behind to scenes to see how Symantec put our high availability and disaster recovery technology to the ultimate test. We loaded a server rack with a multi-tier application stack including an Oracle database on Solaris and the application layer on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as primary data center. A disaster recovery site was set up on a second rack, our failover data center. The applications were clustered using Veritas Cluster Server. Veritas Replicator was set up to do data replication between the sites. And then the fun started, as we took our two "data centers" 18 stories up on a building in the heart of Silicon Valley and we dropped the primary rack off the roof. See how it seamlessly failed over to a recovery site.

Hear from Red Hat and ESG Analysts as they discuss the critical nature of high availability and disaster recovery for data centers running Linux.

For more information on high availability and disaster recovery solutions, please...

What happens if your data center goes down? Businesses need 24/7 availability of their data and applications to keep their operations running smoothly and their customers happy.  And if they do go down, they need to recover – fast.

In this video, we put our high availability and disaster recovery technology to the ultimate test. We loaded a server rack with a multi-tier application stack including an Oracle database on Solaris and the application layer on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as primary data center. A disaster recovery site was set up on a second rack, our failover data center. The applications were clustered using Veritas Cluster Server. Veritas Replicator was set up to do data replication between the sites. And then the fun started, as we took our two “data centers” 18 stories up on a building in the heart of Silicon Valley and we dropped the primary rack off the roof.

What happened when this data center went down? First, it made a really...

Virtualization is everywhere, but IT organizations are still looking for ways to cut costs.  One way to do that, is to…  virtualize even more applications!  However, the easy stuff has been done.  File and print servers, cafeteria menus and the company picnic blog have been virtualized.  The next step is to move up the chain and virtualize business and mission critical applications.  But the risks of virtualization are still there.  How do I monitor and protect my application and business services in the event of a failure, or even a site wide disaster?  What happens to the performance or availability of my data when a path connecting a virtual machine to the storage fails?  These are the roadblocks that are preventing IT organizations from virtualizing more of their business critical services and applications.  The good news is Symantec can help!  

Symantec is announcing a new version of...