Dedicated Servers, Reseller Web Hosting News

Austin, Texas - (The Hosting News) - April 10, 2008 - According to a new study released by Osterman Research and sponsored by security solutions company, Neverfail, over 50 percent of the participants report they are consolidating all email servers into a single data center in one geographic location.

The report indicates that, even amidst today's enlightened business environments, many companies are still leaving their data centers open to severe risk. Yet less than 1 percent says they are protecting these systems with redundant servers in case of disaster -- leaving most at risk of losing data and severely compromising their business.

Encouragingly, the report also found that two-thirds of these companies consider disaster recovery and business continuity an important or critical driver for the adoption of virtualization technology, second only to reducing hardware costs. Regardless of the data center environment, the ubiquity of email use to communicate and exchange business-critical content makes it one of the most important business applications -- one that simply can not go down.

Other interesting facts from the survey and other recent Osterman Research surveys:
-- Nearly three out of five organizations consider enabling continuous operations as an important or critical driver for adopting virtualization. -- However, most decision makers do not understand virtualization well enough to make sound decisions about its adoption. -- Messaging system reliability/uptime is a serious problem for one in five organizations, impacting millions of users in the workplace. Despite this, 3 out of 4 respondents did not see messaging as an important part of their virtualization project. These companies, therefore, must look to alternative technologies to provide business continuity and disaster recovery.

Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research noted, ''We were quite surprised to find so many businesses relying on 'luck' and still thinking about next steps when considering business continuity for their most important applications. It was no surprise that more than half of respondents are planning to put together a virtual environment to address the problem. But what was interesting was the lack of understanding of virtualization amongst the decision makers. It is clear that where a company is building out their business continuity plans there is a need for better integration and understanding of virtualization to deliver continuous availability to prevent any type of business interruption.''

Andrew Barnes, Senior Vice President of corporate development at Neverfail remarked, ''Virtualization is experiencing rapid market growth because of its ability to improve efficiency in data centers through cost savings and resource management. It is good to see that virtualization vendors are now waking companies up to the urgent need for business continuity and disaster recovery. Clearly though there is some way to go for companies to understand how virtualization can be best implemented to protect critical parts of the business.''

With global experience in delivering continuous availability solutions for mission critical applications, Neverfail has experience across physical and virtual infrastructures. As well as protecting critical applications such as email and mobility platforms, Neverfail protects VMware VirtualCenter which sits at the heart of the market leading virtualization platform.

VMware VirtualCenter provides centralized monitoring, remote management, and rapid provisioning capabilities, and serves as the control point for valuable services such as VMware VMotion, Site Recovery Manager and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). This functionality yields significant benefits including increased efficiency and flexibility -- provided that VMware VirtualCenter Server can be accessed by an IT administrator. Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter ensures that IT administrators will not lose access to the features provided by VMware VirtualCenter despite IT interruptions ranging from component failure to external interruptions.

Mr. Barnes added, ''Neverfail customers today blend physical and virtual environments to minimize the time to protect their most critical applications as part of their business continuity and recovery plans. Using virtualization technology in conjunction with Neverfail provides the maximum level of application availability and accelerates the value of virtualization to deliver continuous availability.''

For a copy of the ''Messaging Virtualization Market Trends 2008-2011'' by Osterman Research, please visit www.neverfailgroup.com or contact Neverfail at info@us.neverfailgroup.com.

In addition to protecting virtualized environments, Neverfail also offers solutions for a wide range of Windows-based applications including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, File Server and IIS, as well as RIM BlackBerr and IBM Lotus Domino. Neverfail's products can be implemented in physical and virtual environments and over a LAN or WAN which offers businesses the ability to locate their secondary server in the next room or across the globe. Neverfail's virtualized offerings are now available through more than 850 channel partners and distributors or direct.

Neverfail is a global software company providing data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail's software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail's mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime and enables the more productive use of IT resources.

To learn more about Neverfail, please visit: www.neverfailgroup.com.