And the Lights Went Out….

For those of you in the US, last night was the Super Bowl, and in one of the more unusual twists in the event’s history, there was a massive power loss in the 3rd quarter that required a 35-minute delay for the game.

That was interesting because it had never happened before in a Super Bowl, but it was probably not the only time that the Superdome lost power (Katrina comes to mind quickly.) As my adopted second city, the infrastructure in New Orleans has always had its share of resource challenges, and it is events like this that bring infrastructure (or lack of it) to the forefront. The bigger the event, the bigger the stress, and that is when things break.

When the power was lost to half of the dome, the game was brought to a halt while the officials tried to figure out a.) what was happening and b.) how to resolve this quickly.  Perhaps the Super Bowl is a bad example because when you have these types of delays, the network scrambles to show more commercials, and at those rates, it’s a big benefit for them.  But to the credibility of the game, something is lost.

The key to a good disaster recovery strategy is not in preventing the disaster, but in being able to cope with the disaster and minimize its impact on the business.

Many of our customers look at the vNET I/O Maestro because of its ability to help them ride through situations more efficiently.  With vNET, you can take advantage of the “stateless computing” that vNET offers.

For more on how vNET enables stateless computing, check out our solution brief.

With vNET, servers need only one PCIe card. All network and storage devices are created on the vNET appliances, external to the server. Should a server fail or need to be repaired, the vNET devices can be transparently moved to the replacement server. All settings are preserved and within a short time all services are resumed to normal.

The other issue with disaster recovery is that customers never have the available resources to provide a true 1:1 infrastructure, typically the ratios are much higher. For these customers, having vNET means that when it comes to disaster recovery, they can very quickly configure systems or reconfigure systems to ensure that they have the right systems to address the outage.  Being able to make all of those changes from the nControl console means that customers have speed and flexibility when disaster strikes.