Is it a question of spicing up the software side of things, acquiring better hardware or getting more resilient networking in place?
Well naturally enough, in the ideal world, all three factors would receive more than adequate attention long before an application is due to enter live service thereby allowing its requirements for performance, availability and recovery/protection to be more than adequately delivered. Alas, as we know all too well, this is the real world where, as the figure below shows, such attention to service availability is not considered early enough in projects. If we consider the area of employing software-based solutions to enhance application availability, a lot of attention, especially from the vendor and channel community, is focused on applying a number of virtualisation technologies to the problem. It is fair to say the many flavours of virtualisation currently on offer, especially in the x86 server space, are being promoted as an answer to delivering greater service availability. A closer look at such offerings, essentially any of the operating system/hypervisor virtualisation technologi
