Todays Guest Entry is from : Andrew Barnes, senior vice president, corporate development for Neverfail-dedicated to creating a world where business applications are continuously available.

Small businesses make up a large proportion of the economy, and arguably system downtime has more impact on these resource-stretched organizations than on the data-center supported enterprises.

Not only are SMB's resource-stretched, they are also budget stretched. For the SMB, taking advantage of virtualization is both cost and resource prohibitive, at least in the short term. Today's email servers, databases, SharePoint knowledge bases and even mobility servers, such as the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, are deployed on physical servers. Mass virtualization of these critical servers may be on the agenda at some point in the future, but it requires investment in multiple virtual servers, expensive SAN technology and rarely available skills. Yet downtime won't wait for SMB skills and budgets to catch-up with virtualization.

The alternative is to look at technology that blends physical servers with virtualization to provide the best of both worlds. This technology would use replication, application management and seamless failover to allow physical servers to do their job. In addition, it would create and maintain a complete copy of the applications on the virtual machines on one virtual server so that if the worst happens, failover takes place automatically. This is a win-win situation. Virtualization plays its part in the HA/DR architecture immediately and SMB's get the maximum benefit at the minimum cost.