Disaster recovery planning with virtualization technologies in banking industry

Business interruptions can occur anywhere, anytime. Massive hurricanes, tsunamis, power outages, terrorist bombings and more have made recent headlines. It is impossible to predict what may strike when. In today's 24x7x365 world, it has become mandatory to prepare for such disaster scenarios. With the ever increasing dependence on banks for both electronic and traditional banking services, it has become almost mandatory for the banking industry to plan for 'Business Continuity' (BCP). In this paper, how various innovative virtualization technologies are leveraged to reallocate or restore server, network and storage resources to a critical application based on business priorities will be described. Using the dynamic resource reallocation capabilities offered by virtualization technologies, some mission critical applications such as Exchange email and a transaction intensive database application particularly in banking industry are reconfigured and deployed for rapid recovery through dynamic reallocation of the server, network and storage resources. Rapid improvement in the performance or restoration of the application and therefore minimization of the interruption of the services they provide can be leveraged using the virtualization technologies. This is called Real-time Assurance of Business Continuity (RABC) through virtualization where the "Real-time" can be designed to be non-disruptive to the application of interest or can be minutes to hours depending on business risk tolerance and affordability.