Disaster Recovery
IT pros need to establish a good disaster recovery (DR) plan that includes per-application/VM replication along with simplicity and automation. A plan should categorize applications/VMs according to their business criticality. In the event of a disaster, mission-critical applications need to be up and running in a very short timeframe. This requires that the RPO and RTO of such applications be defined in a granular fashion to meet specific SLAs. Having a high-performance per-application/VM replication capability could be hugely beneficial in getting the critical applications up and running in minutes.
Additionally, this DR plan should account for the ability to automate workflows such as site failover, failback and planned migrations. Given that a vast majority of applications in an enterprise environment today are virtualized, the DR plan should recommend solutions that natively integrate with recovery tools (such as VMware Site Recovery Manager, etc.) for virtualized servers. Such capability would assist the infrastructure managers to set up and execute DR plans with small (or) negligible recovery windows.