Natural disasters and business disruptions can cripple any organization. In today's IT world, downtime and data loss is not an option. Companies must protect their IT and data investments from events that could shut their systems down and affect their bottom line. Business and IT managers alike must be concerned with keeping the IT infrastructure running so that users have access to the corporate IT resources needed to maintain business continuity.

With server virtualization, servers are delivered as virtual machines (VM) and are separated from the underlying server hardware, thus making the protection of VMs and associated data easier than in a physical infrastructure. As a result, IT administrators are increasingly relying on server virtualization to protect against natural disasters and business disruptions. Using Citrix XenServer to protect their IT infrastructure, organizations will benefit from XenServer features such as high availability, datacenter automation, and Site Recovery to reduce the amount of downtime due to disasters and to increase the productivity of their workers.

Highly Available Computing

With the increasing VM densities that computers are handling today, a single server failure can effect a significant number of enterprise applications and debilitate an organization for days. XenServer includes high availability to reduce failover time to minutes and protect critical applications in the event of a server outage. High availability is a simple way to manage the impact of server failures in any IT environment.

Automated VM Snapshots

To protect a virtual machine in the event of an outage or disaster, regularly scheduled VM disk and memory snapshots must be taken. The process of taking a snapshot and storing and maintaining previous images can be cumbersome. XenServer includes automated VM protection and recovery, which allows administrators to schedule regularly automated VM snapshots. These images are archived and then, in the event of an outage or disaster, the administrator can easily retrieve any losses.

Site-to-Site Disaster Recovery

The best defense against data loss is to replicate data between multiple sites. This ensures against any potential catastrophic loss of a single datacenter. XenServer Site Recovery includes the tools required to set up multiple data repository environments; to manage and coordinate between those repositories; to create and frequently test disaster recovery plans; and to fail over to unaffected repositories in the event of an outage or disaster. Server outages cannot be avoided, but Site Recovery ensures data protection and reliable failover plans.

Download the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions solution brief