Using Virtualization to Ensure Uninterrupted Access to Software Applications for Financial Services Firms
Minhua Yang, Yu “Andy” Wu · 2012
With inexpensive and stable commodity hardware, virtualization has come of age and is seeing wide implementation. While benefits of virtualization abound, the focus of this paper is on a specific area -- maintaining uninterrupted services. We present a set of functionalities of virtualization software (VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V) that can be used to: (a) provide high availability during planned and unplanned downtime and (b) facilitate easier and more cost-effective disaster recovery. We illustrate their relevance to financial services firms, to which high availability and disaster recovery are particularly important given the nature of their business and regulatory pressure.