Dell and VMWare have announced a robust disaster recovery solution combining VMWare's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software with Dell's EqualLogic storage arrays. SRM is a significant stand-alone initiative by VMWare to improve their disaster recovery automation with VMWare Infrastructure, while EqualLogic claims to come with its own integrated DR capabilities in the form of snapshots and replication, so it's unclear to what depth this is an actual solution and to what degree it's simply an excuse to issue a joint press release, but something that seems chronically under-discussed with virtualization is disaster recovery.

At first blush, virtualization seems a great boon to disaster recovery planning and simulation. In the bad old days, if you wanted to do a full-fledged disaster recovery simulation, you had to unlimber acres of magnetic tape, spare drives, spare servers, and the like to get an accurate idea of how well your recovery plans would actually work. It was cumbersome and fraught with the potential to disrupt regular operations. Because of all this, many organizations did not regularly test their disaster recovery plans, and many plans turned out to be inadequate in the heat of the moment.

With virtualized infrastructure, it becomes much easier to test (and even to test automatically) disaster recovery, and that's the point of SRM. It isn't clear, however, that even with the ability to more easily test recovery plans, that organizations are actually doing so. If that's the case, all the new tools in the world are worthless, because disaster recovery demands a lot more than just restoring function... it's the end to end capability that's important. You're ahead of the game if you can get your data and processing back, of course, but it's only part of the picture, and virtualization won't address much more than that part.