EMC Global Services has announced a new suite of Continuous Availability Services in response to market demands for always-on active/active IT operations at lower cost. EMC promises that the set of infrastructure assessment and strategic planning services will eliminate even the occasional outages caused by site failures in dual-site architectures. Independent tests and EMC customer engagements demonstrate that the service can decrease server count by 28 percent to 60 percent by combining existing production, high availability, and disaster compute platforms into a single solution.

“We recently examined a continuous availability strategy for one of our major business units,” Keith Mallonee, Senior VP of McKesson IT, said. “What we learned is that continuous availability is not only architecturally feasible, leveraging off-the-shelf products, it is achievable at significant savings. EMC practitioners delivered far more than we expected, and the strategy is readily executable, enabling us to bring the business case to management quickly and efficiently.”

EMC describes Continuous Availability Advisory Services as a “comprehensive assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and roadmap development” program to improve information availability capabilities while reducing CAPEX and OPEX in part by using off-the-shelf availabilities including EMC VPLEX.

The services include:

• Application and existing infrastructure readiness assessment,
• Architectural design development,
• Roadmap and cost benefit analysis for the technical deployment and transition,
• Data security refocus from recovery time and recovery point objects to continuous non-stop availability,
• Risk reduction,
• Competitive advantage creation through an “always-on, always-available access architecture,
• IT environment reliability and efficiency improvements.

EMC’s VPLEX provides the critical foundation for Continuous Availability by presenting read/writable virtual volumes in two geographically separated ata centers. It enables users to build “stretched data centers”, permitting them to process collaboratively, using server clustering technologies over distance, and to take a new approach to business continuity design and execution. In traditional dual-site architectures with array-based replication, customers still experience some level of downtime during site failures. However, solutions built with VPLEX and off-the-shelf clustering technologies can attain up to 100% availability.