What would you do if you knew a major catastrophe was on its way and threatened to totally destroy your data center?

I venture to say you really couldn't do anything today except maybe unplug everything and hope for the best. But if you had time to plan, what would you do?

My first plans, as many of yours, is to take a backup. Ship it off-site and wait. Wait until when? When the data changes no doubt. Well that backup just went obsolete if you use old-school backup technologies.

In step virtualization. People talk about virtualization for resource management but did you know it can also be used for a disaster recovery strategy? And you still get all the benefits you went the virtualization route in the first place. We really need to think of virtualization as more than just resource usage. We need to think of virtualization as we do about any technology we purchase. How can it satisfy my WHOLE architectural plan to provide consistent and constant access to information. We need to leverage technology across all aspects of the infrastructure, not just a simple bullet list of feature sets.

There is a really good write-up on this at Computerworld that gets you thinking just a little bit more about how virtualization can empower your organization across functional units within IT.