The role of SANs in high availability and disaster recovery

Overview

Comprehensive business continuity solutions include not only the capacity to recover operations after a major disaster, but also the capacity to remain on line during minor disruptions. Server virtualization software has brought great relief to IT organizations searching for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions with a low cost of entry.

Many potential reasons for failure can cause business-critical applications to go off line and endanger a company’s viability. While server virtualisation has provided solutions that help with
business continuance strategies, many traditional SANs do not provide effective support for the storage availability that server virtualisation requires.

This paper discusses how HP LeftHand P4000 SANs can provide continuous
storage availability across storage system, rack and building failures, helping server virtualisation software to effectively implement HA solutions that are automatic and dependable.