http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/topics/article.asp?DocID=1301076

While most of the buzz around server virtualisation in general, and VMware Infrastructure in particular, have been about server consolidation and greening the data centre, disaster recovery may be the IT area where server virtualisation technology has the biggest impact.

Disaster recovery (DR) planning for mission-critical applications historically called for replicating the data for these applications and having servers standing by at the DR site ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

Most organisations can save money by virtualising these standby servers. A single offsite server can act as the standby domain controller, SQL server, Exchange server and several more. Not only can you save the cost of all those physical servers, but also the rack space and power charges from your DR site.

Very cool, it will be interesting to see what innovations, what best practices come out of the need to be more energy efficient with the data center, in terms of our ‘live’ and business continuity/disaster recovery sites. Being able to virtualize the disaster recovery sites could bring real savings in terms of hardware and hosting costs, the ability to take that disaster recovery site of 500 DL380’s/580’s and replace with a batch of blade servers or DL585’s could mean changing your requirements from 60 racks to 20, a significant space saving in valuable data center real estate.

A good read, do check it out.