Using Virtualization to Ensure Uninterrupted Access to Software Applications for Financial Services Firms

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.