August 30, 2011, 4:52 PM — An enormous chunk of the money we spend on IT infrastructure goes to avoiding downtime -- from redundant power supplies and disks to clustering and redundant data centers. Yet we happily spend it. Lost productivity and shattered user confidence have a damaging effect on the ol' career prospects.
Of all of the advances over the past 10 years, server virtualization has probably done more than any other technology to decrease exposure to downtime. What server clustering once did for single database platforms, virtualization clusters can now do for any application you can run on them -- which will soon be just about everything.
[Quick and easy productivity wins for IT and Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. Zoho Docs]
Technologies like VMware's vMotion, which allows a virtual machine to be moved from one virtualization host to another without any perceptible downtime, and VMware High Availability (HA), which allows automated recovery from host failure, have gotten a lot of attention for their ability to eliminate or substantially decrease downtime windows. But if you ask me, one weapon in VMware's arsenal doesn't get the attention it deserves: Storage vMotion.
The Storage vMotion proposition
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