Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, often translates into lost opportunities and increased costs - and for many enterprises today, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. Having an effective recovery strategy and a set of coherent disaster recovery plans is essential to helping avoid downtime during a crisis.

The need for enhanced quality, efficiency, and predictability for disaster recovery and business continuity has increased significantly, highlighting the necessity of a well-defined set of recovery plans and regular testing. However, as the required scope of critical processes, production applications, and enterprise demands increases, sustaining the timeliness and effectiveness of a recovery plan can become increasingly difficult. For most organizations, disaster recovery is extremely labor intensive, often requiring the manual coordination of hundreds of recovery tasks. So although the importance of having an effective disaster recovery plan is clear, organizations often find it difficult to achieve the level of protection they need.

Dell and VMware have partnered to offer a cost-effective, high-availability architecture based on Dell™ server and storage clusters and VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) - one designed to minimize scheduled and unscheduled downtime by protecting against component failures, automating the recovery process, eliminating complex manual recovery steps, and enabling nondisruptive testing.