www.caverntech.com/resources/articles/09-04-07/Marriott -
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Published on: 4/7/2009
Last Visited: 7/6/2009
Dan Blanchard, VP of enterprise operations at Marriott, says the company's strategy has been to use virtual servers wherever possible, which, in turn, makes the recovery process quicker, easier and more reliable in that part of the IT environment.
Because workloads are often shifted, moving them to a disaster recovery environment is just one more step, he says.
Another key advantage: potential errors or problems have likely been spotted and eliminated through ongoing testing, Blanchard says.
Applications running on virtual servers aren't validated only on a quarterly basis as part of the disaster recovery test process; they're tested as part of normal operations, Blanchard says.
But Marriott hasn't been able to shift all of its applications to its VMware technology.
Some vendors have refused to support their software if it runs in a virtual environment, and others haven't figured out how to charge for licenses, Blanchard says.
...
Blanchard says the key differentiator that pushed the Iron Mountain facility ahead of two other finalists was the environmental benefit.
The top criteria to select the site had been mileage (because the company wanted IT staffers to be able to reach the facility without need of an airplane), security and the corporate philosophy to "conserve and preserve," he says.
...
We're dually using those systems," says Blanchard.
"That prevents us from having to go out and purchase and power a set of infrastructure that does nothing but sit there and wait for a disaster."
The systems will be identical to those in the production environment, so staffers won't need to brush up their skills on different technology in a disaster scenario.
Virtual servers will ease the movement of some workloads from one set of hardware to another, even possibly from servers at the primary data center to servers at the new RDC, Blanchard says.
Initial plans call for two Marriott employees to work on provisioning and maintenance work at the underground site, with the potential to add more staff and space, if necessary, to accommodate business growth.
Marriott has some 115,000 rooms in the pipeline over the next several years, according to a company spokesperson.
"Building this second data center," says Blanchard, "we position ourselves to be able to accommodate that kind of [business] growth."
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