I speak with a lot of our customers, and a frequent topic of conversation is around virtualization. Just a few years ago, most I spoke with didn't have more than 20 to 30% of their applications virtualized. Now that figure is typically around 70% or higher, and most customers say their goal is to hit as close to 100% as they can. The common blocker to virtualizing, though, is concern over application availability.

It's for this reason that we developed our ApplicationHA solution a few years back to manage in-guest monitoring of applications and restart of the application in the event of a failure. More recently, we announced a new release of Veritas Cluster Server which allows users to create clusters of virtual machines, and failover an application to an already-running standby virtual machine.

Taneja Group has been watching the disaster recovery/business continuity space in the industry, and just recently...

There was a time when, for many organizations, implementing a disaster recovery infrastructure meant deploying millions of dollars worth of server, storage and network hardware at an alternate data center. The belief was that to do DR right, you had to duplicate the production infrastructure and the result was a lot of expensive equipment sitting idle until a disaster - or a disaster recovery exercise - put the equipment to use.

Needless to say, those days are gone and they're not coming back. Such investments are simply no longer affordable or practical. And thanks to modern technology, they're also no longer necessary.

In this first attempt of mine at a video blog - or "vlog", if you will - I'll describe how Symantec's disaster recovery solutions can leverage virtualization technologies to achieve a cost-effective DR infrastructure.

...

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...