VMware’s announcement today of their vision to merge internal and external clouds and the concept of a virtual data center gives new meaning to disaster recovery. It decouples DR from hardware and instead focuses on a “stateless” recovery. No longer are applications tied to the physical hardware in a data center – they are now essentially geographically virtualized. Coupled with IP failover technologies, unified Ethernet and Fibre Channel and other “things to come”, companies can dream of a day when their entire IT environment can be failed over anywhere in the world by the pressing of a button.

This gives a new meaning to Disaster Recovery. The entire concept of DR was built around the need to recover the environment in the event of a failure of the “physical kind” – be it data centers or hardware. But with a virtual data center built on top of unified internal and external clouds, there is no such physical constraint. Disaster recovery is now essentially nothing but an extension of operational recovery. You have a failure of a guest or virtual machine – you simply “move” it from one cloud to another. A data center went down – no problem. Simply move all the VMs to the external clouds and you are up and running in a few minutes.

The key to this success is a management framework. An interface that allows all the clouds to be managed from a single console but at the same time it is a distributed framework. The word “distributed” is a key quality here because you want your platform administrators to be “virtual” as well. They should be able to manage the virtual environments from any location.

Did I say this was easy? I did not. The reason is because the devil is in the details. Don’t let this fool you – this is still a concept and VMware is trying hard to prove it. But they can only do so much. The rest depends on the maturity of the IT organization. And that is no different than what it is today. VMware’s gestures are not a replacement for policies and processes. After all it is just technology – and technology is just an enabler.

-Ashish Nadkarni, GlassHouse Senior Consultant