Last week, Symantec and Microsoft announced a joint effort to deliver Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This hybrid approach will involve using Symantec Storage Foundation HA for Windows on the customer premises to provide data replication and failover management to Microsoft's Azure cloud services. This is a pretty big deal.

While our largest customers have the luxury of multiple data centers spread across a large area, most companies don't. With multiple data centers, a company can provision additional capacity in each one to host another data center's critical applications in the event of a site failure. But in the absence of additional real estate, a company's options for disaster recovery are more limited. And this is where DRaaS comes into play.

This service will allow smaller organizations to acquire virtual real estate in the form of Microsoft's...

VMworld 2012 is around the corner - August 26-30th, 2012 (US) && October 9-11th (EMEA).  What do you want to see, hear, & learn at #VMworld 2012? Call for Papers Voting is open! Vote for your favourite topics. bit.ly/JnkmdG

I've been blogging over the past couple of weeks under the theme "Everything you think you know about clustering is wrong". It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek theme, but the misconceptions I was trying to dispel are real and held by enough people that I felt they were worth addressing. But now I want to shift gears a little bit.

In my last post, I mentioned how a lot of people can't seem to break out of the late-1990s mindset of 2-node active/passive failover HA:

While large clusters meant we no longer needed two nodes for every critical application, many people's mindsets were still stuck in 1997 and they continued to view HA clustering in a 2-node, active/passive context.

To be sure, that's definitely not the case with all of our customers, especially...