Almost over night the whole equation around disaster recovery has changed from something that took days and weeks to accomplish to something that can now be done in minutes. Much of that advance can be attributed to advances in virtualization that are being coupled with traditional load balancing technology.

For example, BlueLock, a provider of cloud computing services based in Indianapolis is using load balancing from F5 Network alongside virtualization software from VMware to provide customers with an instant disaster recovery capability.

What BlueLock is doing is leveraging the ability to put virtual machines from VMware into sleep mode on different sets of physical servers. If the load balancing software from F5 detects a spike in demand coming in across the network, it will automatically wake up the appropriate number of virtual servers to make available the appropriate amount of processing horsepower.

This ability not only gives BlueLock options when it comes to billing customers for the service, it also allows BlueLock to come up with service level agreements that are readily enforceable. Of course, enterprise customers could opt to create their own version of BlueLock set up. But the rise of cloud computing services gives them another option that does not require capital investment at a time when capital is in short supply.

In general, new server and storage technologies are combining to drastically reduce the cost of disaster recovery while simultaneously increasing flexibility. The end result of all this work should result in new approaches to disaster recovery that in the very near future will become standard across all enterprise computing scenarios.