Big Bucks Lure New Blood in Virtualization Tools - Page 2

Page 2 of 2

Failover and recovery

One additional benefit of using 3Leaf V-8000 v2.0 is that it runs on inexpensive, commodity x86 servers and uses off-the-shelf fabric. "We drive mainframe-class features into x86-class commodity servers," said Rob Reiner, 3Leaf's senior director of marketing.

Elsewhere in the virtualization arena, SunGard Availability Services, which currently offers an outsourced, remote disaster recovery service, has extended this to the virtual environment. It today unveiled its Virtual Server Replication Services. SunGard currently offers an outsourced, remote disaster recovery service it is now extending to the virtual environment.

The offering marks the first fruit of its recently announced partnership with VMware, under which the two are working to deliver fully managed virtualization-based services.

Virtual Server Replication Services is for enterprises running their business applications on virtual machines. It lets these companies implement a comprehensive second site recovery program for virtual and physical IT environments, with failover within six hours.

That's a mighty long time for a virtualized environment, EMA's Mann noted. "I'd think if you have mission-critical applications you'd want to recover them in a lot quicker than six hours."

"Microsoft and VMware are battling over milliseconds in terms of virtualization for disaster recovery and business continuity," he added.

Customers using SunGard Virtual Server Replication Services can recreate their virtual machine infrastructure and store the server operating system, data and applications in a dormant state at a SunGard datacenter.

When a customer's existing environment crashes and the customer activates failover, SunGard brings the virtual disk file up live at one of its secure datacenters so the customer can use that instead.

The failover copy runs on a virtualized IT infrastructure provided by SunGard using VMware technology.

Also vying for a greater share of growing enterprise spending on virtualization is StackSafe, which provides pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams through its Test Center offering.

Staging takes place when IT sets up an environment just as it would be in production, but doesn't connect it to other production systems, Mann explained. The upshot is that IT staff can then test it without worrying about its effect on the rest of the enterprise.

The newest version of Test Center, announced today, automatically imports of virtual infrastructure components into a test environment together with physical components, so users can stage both their virtualized and physical production environments for testing.

Users can test physical production machines running Windows, Red Hat Linux and CentOS Linux, and virtual machines running VMware ESX 3.x. They can also stage and test external infrastructure components that cannot be virtualized, such as large databases, mainframes and storage tiers, as well as network components not owned by the IT department, such as cloud and SaaS applications.

"Test Center meets the needs of IT operations teams no matter what their production environment looks like," said Loren Burnett, StackSafe's president and CEO.