Is Virtualization The Key To Continuity?

Business continuity and disaster recovery have long been sore points for enterprise IT. Can virtualization change all that and make true continuity a reality ... or at least, make recovering from disaster a faster and more thorough operation? That's the premise of our latest InformationWeek Analytics poll.And in theory, virtualization should make it much easier for IT to provision a DR site with fewer physical devices, and get a full slate of systems back up and running quickly, without OS/software/driver issues.

But theory can run into budgetary and manpower constraints; hypervisor software isn't inexpensive, and some companies are lucky to be able to manage the server virtualization deployments in their primary data centers. Share your plans and experiences by taking our survey, through Oct. 23, or write to me.

Results of the poll, which should take about 5 minutes to complete, will appear in an upcoming issue of InformationWeek as well as an in-depth report. You'll also be eligible to enter a drawing to receive a 16GB iPod touch valued at $399 from TechWeb.