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Virtualizing Business Critical Applications: Data Protection

A major aspect of virtualizing any business critical application is data protection which encompasses not only backup, but disaster recovery, and business continuity. It is imperative that our data be protected. While this is true of all workloads, it becomes a bigger concern when virtualizing business critical applications. Not only do we need backups, but we need to protect the business, which is where business continuity comes into play.

VDI Stall: VDI Appliances solve the hardware problem so, what next?

We’ve discussed the fact that VDI appliance makers were making good progress simplifying adoption of a virtual desktop infrastructure. An appliance-based route to market can be seen as win-win: being designed both to reduce cost and complexity of implementation (for the customer) and shorten sales cycles (for the vendor). So goes the theory. To understand this theory further one VDI appliance vendor, Pivot3, commissioned Dimensional Research to survey global IT in order to get real-world insight into the state of VDI.

How Good an Idea to Virtualize XenApp?

How good an idea to Virtualize XenApp? There were a number of benefits identified way back then: hardware abstraction allowing easier image management and OS upgrades; options for higher availability and faster recovery; even fail-over. Virtualization enabled silo consolidation and importantly enabled better management of user capacity on servers. However, there is a price. Reduced density and performance. Not all applications will benefit. That said, the flexibility that virtualization of XenApp offers is likely of greater benefit to many organisations.

Virtual Future in our Virtual Designs

Is it time to plan for the virtual future in our virtual designs? Happy New Year and welcome to 2013!! What a year 2012 turned out to be for virtualization and/or cloud computing in general. Microsoft Hyper-V, RedHat and VMware have all made quite a few enhancements with the hypervisor and we have finally gotten to a point where we really have some good competition between hypervisors, but also the competition boundaries are being expanded to include much more than just the hypervisor itself as we start to focus on the ecosystem as a whole.

Are you using or considering implementation of a storage hypervisor?

Depending upon what your or somebody else’s definition of a storage hypervisor is, you may or may not be using one or realize it.

If your view of a storage hypervisor is a storage IO optimization technology to address performance and other issues with virtual machines (VMs) and their hypervisors, such as Virsto or ScaleIO along with others, you might be calling those storage hypervisors as opposed to middleware, management tools, drivers, plug-in, shims, accelerators, or optimizers.