Hey Mr. Data Center, Are You Available?

When EMC develops its products and services, we endeavor to do our best to take a bite out of our customers’ spend, ease their minds about building trust and enable greater visibility into their IT infrastructures.

We’ve cleared the fences once again with our new Continuous Availability Advisory Services based on EMC VPLEX. This game-changing approach to continuous availability helps organizations mitigate downtime, transform their IT infrastructures and enables cost savings.

Just how do EMC’s new services and VPLEX virtual storage prepare organizations to better mitigate outages (be they human error, natural phenomena, etc.) and improve business continuity? Glad you asked.

Delivered by EMC Global Services, Continuous Availability Advisory Services helps enable customers to shift their focus from recovery time and recovery point objectives to improved availability. The coolest part? This can be done using off-the-shelf products, like VPLEX. Deliverables include:

CAASPulse

Getting back to cost savings (while recouping valuable data center space), Continuous Availability Advisory Services enables organizations to reduce server count by combining existing production, high availability and disaster recovery compute platforms into a single solution. That’s sweet music to any CIO’s ears, and wallets.

So why do customers need Continuous Availability? Let me present the current facts of IT life:

  • Organizational reliance on information is on an ever-increasing trajectory upwards
  • Users no longer ‘expect’ 24×7 access to data and system availability—they demand it
  • One of IT’s biggest concerns is the availability of information (See Forrester Consulting study below)
  • IT is under pressure to reduce spending while increasing service levels

A recent Forrester Consulting study on continuous IT availability commissioned by EMC, describes how organizations are improving business resiliency by adopting this approach. Watch Stephanie Balaouras, Forrester Vice President and Research Director, discuss its benefits and adoption…

And how does VPLEX factor in here? Previously, a Continuous Availability environment was either limited within a data center, or required complex systems integration which made it quite expensive to build and maintain. Enter VPLEX and its off-the-shelf ability to provide read/writable virtual volumes in two geographically separated data centers. Users get to build “stretched data centers,” allowing them to process data collaboratively and maximizing server clustering technologies over distance.

CAAS2

Let’s hear from EMC customer, Keith Mallonee, SVP, McKesson IT, on the transformative capabilities of Continuous Availability Advisory Services:

“We recently examined a continuous availability strategy for one of our major business units. What we learned is that continuous availability is not only architecturally feasible, leveraging off-the-shelf products, it is achievable at significant savings. EMC practitioners delivered far more than we expected, and the strategy is readily executable, enabling us to bring the business case to management quickly and efficiently.”

Continuous Availability Advisory Services are a game-changing approach to infrastructure uptime and, by extension, business continuity. They help customers enable a trusted always-on-and-available IT infrastructure (in techie speak – Active/Active). Preventive approaches to data loss and system interruption should be more than a nice-to-have. More like, where do I sign up?

Visit our Continuous Availability ECN Page for more, including a webinar featuring Forrester Consulting and EMC experts.

About the Author: Mat Allen