Our Solution: The Virtual Iron platform provides the highest levels of performance and application availability while reducing hardware costs at the same time. Companies leverage Virtual Iron’s advanced virtualization capabilities to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity operations. With Virtual Iron's high availability solutions users can:

• Recover from failures quickly, reliably, and cost efficiently.
• Use policies (business rules) to monitor server uptime and automate resource failovers.
• Use LiveRecovery™ to fail-over transparently without the need to reconfigure the OS and applications. Set up secondary sites without requiring identical hardware.
• Allow multiple Virtual Servers to fail over to a single Virtual Servers (N+1 clustering), reducing the amount of hardware required.
• Handle multiple concurrent failures under the same N+1 clustering scenario.
• Use LiveMaintenance™ allowing system administrators to provide service availability while performing routine hardware maintenance.
• Protect applications through hardware independence and fault isolation between Virtual Servers.

Our Capabilities: The features above enable three key capabilities in the Virtual Iron platform:

• Hardware Independence. The virtualization layer of Virtual Iron provides the flexibility to allow rapid recovery from failures because workloads can be migrated and restored on any hardware anywhere regardless of configuration. It also allows CPU, memory, and I/O to be hot-pluggable, allowing capacity to be scaled up and down without application interruption. Virtual Iron’s virtual servers use NAS and SAN file systems in the same way as physical systems, allowing data backup and replication to proceed with the same utilities and tools that are used with physical servers. Also, the same image can run in physical or virtual environment providing built-in redundancy. Multi-pathing has been built into the I/O layer, allowing applications to continue to run even if network or storage switches fail.
• Hardware Consolidation. Clustering software can bind two redundant servers into a hot standby pair resulting in no application downtime if the primary server experiences a hardware or software error. Passive servers consume few computing resources in standby mode allowing multiple passive servers to be consolidated on one physical server. As a result, the enterprise is able to realize the benefit of high availability without duplicate servers, providing N+1 failover instead of current 2N failover scenarios, improving hardware utilization.  
• Management/LiveRecovery™. Virtual Iron monitors a variety of general hardware failures on physical servers and switches, such as fans, power, and temperature using standards such as IPMI. Heartbeat monitoring of the physical and virtual resources allows instant response in the event of failures. Policies can take actions such as moving failing servers out of running virtual servers. If the server is removed prior to failure, there is no impact to application availability. Virtual Iron can automatically detect hardware failures, resulting in momentary downtime equal to the time to reboot the virtual server on a new physical server. Virtualization also allows a virtual server to run on any server hardware without reconfiguring its operating system, storage, or network.