Better Together

In the last couple of weeks I've had a chance to reacquaint myself with a couple of great local I.T. vendors. They're helping us craft a Disaster Recovery strategy.

For larger companies this is relatively easy. Just throw gobs of money, time and resources at the problem and away you go. It's actually easier to justify DR in a larger business environment than in a smaller one - even though the predictable outcome of NOT having a recovery plan is the same. (I've had to do both.)

For privately held firms or smaller public firms, "DR on a budget" is a lofty challenge. Duplicating a server rack at another site is expensive. Having all your applications hosted at a 3rd party data center is expensive. There has to be a better alternative.

This week, a couple of local vendors are really stepping up. Our shop is thinking about virtualizing our servers - both for the daily benefit of leveraging unused processing power and because we can take a "snapshot" of the virtualized servers to shorten recovery time in the event of a disaster.

Virtualizing servers effectively separates applications from hardware, allowing the applications to be easily transported and recovered into another virtualized environment very quickly.

Think of it this way.

Circa 1950, every office Manager had their own secretary to do typing. One Manager. One secretary. Sometimes the secretary was overwhelmed with work and sometimes there was no work to do. Then someone came up with a different idea.

By introducing "typing pools", a group of secretaries were organized to handle the typing needs of a group of Managers. In this way, no single secretary got overwhelmed with work.

Server virtualization works the same way. Most servers are responsible for one main application or service. By pooling processing power across applications, we can make better use of our servers.

Well, once we get our servers virtualized, we benefit on a daily basis. But, in the event of a disaster, where can we recover? We're all set to go. We have snapshot tape backups of our virtual servers in hand.

Now what?

Well, it turns out that there are NOT a whole lot of great options for small business. If we want to recover our data at a hosted site, we need to rent the site as if we were using it every day. This option is way too expensive (or we'd already be doing it).

So the way I see it, we've just uncovered a business opportunity for our vendors. And to our vendors' credit, they see it too. So now, they're trying to figure out how they might host DR services for small business. The idea would be to setup a series of virtual servers in their data center, then contract to several companies for the same recovery space to cover their equipment costs. And voila! An affordable DR solution for smaller businesses.

Companies like SunGuard and IBM have been doing this for years for big companies. Now it's time that someone offered the same protection for smaller business - at prices that smaller businesses can afford.

The lesson here, is that some customers simply invite their vendors into the office to be beaten up on price. Smarter customers take a look for opportunities where both customer and vendor can be better together.

There are almost always win/win outcomes, if everyone is willing to look for them.