As part of my job (Director of IT) I skim a lot of newsletters and such each day to keep on top of the industry news. One of today’s Network World emails caught my eye since it mentioned TiVo. They’d done an article on TiVo’s new disaster recovery system. They’ve setup a disaster recovery site in Las Vegas, NV to take over if anything (read: earthquake) happens to their main facilities in Alviso, CA. They’re also looking at server virtualization to assist in disaster recovery.
TiVo is also considering moving to virtualization as a way to simplify disaster recovery. “If a service has a problem, you can just apply a virtual image of it onto another server or servers and very quickly recover,†he says. “It really shortens your time to recovery, which is the thing everyone is always searching for when they have a disaster recovery facility.â€
That’s interesting, since DR is usually one of the lesser factors in moving to virtualization. Most of the time the first factors mentioned are resource utilization, reduction of power and cooling needs, improvements in manageability and reliability, etc. I wonder what platform TiVo is looking at using.
Virtualization is a hot topic in the industry right now, with VMware having just launched their IPO and Citrix acquiring XenSource. We’re planning to migrate to VMware at work too, I’ve been pushing virtualization for a few years now.
And if none of this made sense to you, don’t worry – just write it off as geek-speak and forget about it. You’re better off. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Here there be monsters. 
