How Virtualization Simplifies and Speeds Up Disaster Recovery

Simplify Recovery

In the IT infrastructure field, disaster recovery is a very important process that helps to ensure continuity of business. Recovery through traditional mechanical methods is laborious and time-consuming. This has however changed with the advent of virtualization; which has simplified and accelerated the process.

Related Image © VMware

Traditional Physical Recovery

The traditional approach to DR involves going over several time-consuming steps.

1. Configure Hardware: A new hardware needs to be configured at this stage which might take longer because it’s complicated. It includes setting up servers, ensuring compatibility, and managing physical space.
2. Install OS: Once the hardware is ready, the operating system (OS) should be installed. This process involves loading the OS, doing initial configurations, and updating patches which could take a lot of hours.
3. Configure OS: More configuration after installation helps in customizing the OS for specific business application requirements.
4. Install Backup Agent: This starts when the operating system has been properly configured to facilitate data recovery using a backup agent where backups must restore data correctly
5. Start "Single-Step" Automatic Recovery: The last step involves starting an automatic recovery process, it does not mean that it happens in a flash it can take significant time to complete

In total, these steps can consume more than 40 hours, making the physical recovery process highly inefficient during a disaster scenario.

Virtualized Recovery

Virtualization offers a stark contrast by drastically reducing recovery times to under four hours. The process is streamlined as follows.

1. Restore VM: Virtual machines (VMs) can be rapidly restored from backup. This is because, unlike the physical hardware that takes a relatively longer duration to configure, VMs are essentially files that can be duplicated and recovered.
2. Power VM: Once the VM is restored, the system is powered on within a very short time after its recovery meaning that it is ready for use whenever necessary.

Benefits of Virtualized Recovery

1. Time Efficiency: Virtualization reduces recovery time from over 40 hours due to hardware configuration and OS installation to less than 4 hours.
2. Simplified Process: Recovery steps are fewer, thus making the process more standardized or simple. Therefore this decreases the complexity and likelihood of human mistakes.
3. Flexibility: There is increased flexibility in virtualized environments allowing easy scaling up as well as adaptability to new requirements.
4. Cost-Effective: By reducing downtime, organizations experience cost savings since they may resume normal operations faster after an incident thereby reducing the financial impact of a disaster.

Conclusion

By including virtualization in their contingency plans, organizations can save their IT structures. It not only makes it easier to get up and running but also ensures efficiency and speeds up the recovery of services. Besides cost savings, businesses can maintain operational resilience by using their capabilities in disaster prevention and recovery through virtualization.