Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning are critical to managing risks in a successful business. Between 60-90% of companies that don't have a proactive disaster plan find themselves out of business within 2-4 months of experiencing a major disaster. However, implementation of a reliable recovery strategy with fast time to recovery is expensive largely because it involves maintaining recovery equipment that mirrors the equipment in the primary data center. Upgrades to both primary and recovery target equipment must occur in lock-step, hence many companies forgo the process.

Yet, companies that make compromises in disaster recovery strategy such as limiting the disaster coverage to only the most critical applications, employing manual processes to recover on dissimilar equipment, or outsourcing to discount DR centers risk insufficient disaster protection in terms of application coverage, acceptable downtime, and reliability of recovery.

This compromise is not necessary. In this paper we will discuss how to make disaster recovery cost effective with virtual infrastructure.