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Should virtualization vendors offer disaster recovery options?
What are these services like now? Should vendors be obligated to offer some type of automated recovery service as part of their product, or does this fall out of the realm of their responsibility?
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6 Answers
Obligated? No.
Vendors offer what they think customers want or need. Many of the vendors in the IaaS space currently offer various redundancy and DR options, and these are not selected to the same degree as their base offerings. Redundancy costs money, and vendors will offer it if there is sufficient demand (or an no-brainer price point).
Customers who desire these redundancy options will gravitate to vendors that offer them, which will make redundancy and disaster recovery more desirable selling points.
Unlike, say, automobile safety, disaster recovery of a computing environment can be done in very many ways, is very dependent upon the business needs, and is not always required (as in the case of a test environment). Why would I want to have the costs to do it baked into a product that won't need it, or won't offer it in a way that makes sense for my specific business? I wouldn't.
Vendors would be wise to offer tiers of service that facilitate DR at some level, so that I can plan my computing needs accordingly, or they might lose my business altogether as my needs grow. But, this might not be true for every organization, so it is better to let the market decide this sort of thing. That said, I do see automated DR options becoming more prevalent over time...
-ASB: http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker
I agree that a provider should not be obligated to provide a full recovery capability with what they provide. I do believe that they would be very short sighted if they do not have one to offer with the systems/platforms they offer. Most of the organizations that are deploying VMs have that as a secondary gain after system/CPU consolidation.
At least one virtualization vendor (VMware) does. Site Recovery Manager (or SRM) is a product that keeps a "warm" copy of production VMs. The sync rate is configurable and swinging over configurations to the Disaster Recovery/Standby site is *mostly* scriptable and automated.
That said, we (architects and virtualization engineers) have been designing solutions using virtualization technology to provide DR for years now. Packages like SRM make our jobs easier and reduce the steps necessary for recovery. I expect that if they don't already, most vendors will have similar offerings within the next 12-18 months at most.
I am surprised that they do not, especially for small businesses.
I agree with Andrew. Let me add, a value add proposition would be advantageous for cloud vendors.
I agree that this should not be a requirement by the vendor, eluding to Andrew's point that most vendors attempt to provide the customer with what they think they want or need. Bundling a DR solution with virtualization solutions may cause the customer to feel that they are accruing high out of pocket costs for something that they may not be interested in or may not want that specific vendor to supply. A lot SMBs are not using foresight and rather are looking to solve an immediate challenge and continue on a need by need basis model. At the end of the day, a good vendor should attempt to look at the customer's actual need and base their offering options on that as many customers may not fully understand what it is that they actually require.
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