Our first video interview at VMworld was with Sungard Availability Services. Sungard has decades worth of experience helping organizations plan for and recover from disasters. They have used this experience to identify, and plan for, a new area of exposure in the enterprise data center, recovery of the hybrid environment.

What is the Hybrid Environment?

A hybrid environment actually describes most data centers. It is a data center that is supporting both a virtual environment as well as a legacy physical environment. Most reports place the level of server virtualization in most data centers at about 50%. The remainder is still not virtualized. As a result most data centers are going to be dealing with this problem.

The Hybrid Environment Challenge

As we discussed in our above interview with Sungard, the hybrid environment is more challenging because it requires multiple tools to move data to the disaster recovery site and it requires multiple tools to stand up the recovery site in the event of a failure. This lack of a single technology silver bullet makes people and process, as well as testing, more important than ever.

Storage Swiss Take

The planning, people management and processes required for success can only come from experience. Sungard’s ability to bring a historical (measured in decades) understanding of the disaster recovery process. It gives them a unique perspective when helping their customers recover the data center of today, one that is hybrid, from a disaster.