Implementing plans to ensure business continuity for key IT services is an essential requirement for organizations today. Downtime of important applications is a costly proposition and extended downtime can even be fatal—industry research finds that a significant number of companies that experience extended interruption to IT services soon go out of business.

• High costs. Business continuity solutions become exponentially more expensive as availability requirements increase. Many solutions require significant investment in additional hardware, software and services. Disaster recovery plans in particular often require duplicating data center infrastructure. These requirements drive up the cost of business continuity and result in a proliferation of underutilized servers.
• High complexity. Most traditional business continuity solutions add significant complexity to data center environments. Acquiring and managing additional servers, implementing and maintaining specialized business continuity software and developing specialized processes for business continuity all contribute to this complexity.
• Failure to meet recovery time and availability goals. Due to the cost and complexity of business continuity solutions, organizations are often forced to compromise on solutions that are unlikely to meet objectives for availability and recovery time.
• Insufficient reliability. Testing complex business continuity solutions is challenging and requires significant equipment and personnel resources. The complexity of these specialized solutions also makes them difficult to maintain and makes it harder to ensure that sufficient staff are trained and available when needed. VMware provides cost-effective, simpler, more reliable solutions for increasing availability and improving disaster recovery so that organizations can implement dramatically better and broader business continuity plans.

• Reduce downtime due to both planned and unplanned outages.
• Lower cost of business continuity plans.
• Provide high availability for all applications with standard server hardware.
• Share fault-tolerant server, storage and networking hardware between multiple applications
• Simplify infrastructure and processes for business continuity.

• Reduced downtime. Customers can eliminate much of their planned downtime with a virtual infrastructure solution. They can also prevent and reduce unplanned downtime through economical sharing of fault-tolerant hardware features and automated restart of application servers. Encapsulated virtual machines enable dramatic reductions in time to recovery for disaster scenarios.
• Lower costs. Virtual infrastructure makes it possible for companies to implement better business continuity at a lower cost by slashing the need for additional hardware and specialized software.
• Simplified processes. Virtual infrastructure removes the complexity of maintaining duplicate physical systems for disaster recovery. It also eliminates and streamlines much of the recovery process.
• Broader protection. Because virtual infrastructure reduces the cost of business continuity solutions, companies can cost-effectively increase availability and ensure more rapid disaster recovery for more of their important applications.