In addition, because it’s easy to replicate the contents, Wilson doesn’t need staffers to ensure that the data between the two locations is in sync and that configuration changes and updates have been made in both locations, which can be incredibly complex due to dissimilarities in hardware types at the locations. “It’s a big time-saver,” he says. When asked what the value of his efforts is to the business side, his answer is simple yet critical: “We can quickly recover business applications—that’s the value.”

In Kane County, one of two data centers sits on a bank of the Fox River in Illinois, vulnerable to flooding. Siles has ensured that both data centers can be easily and quickly replicated to each other using VMware’s VMotion technology. That’s crucial, Siles points out, because county emergency personnel use these resources.

At Arch Coal, Abbene’s team has been able to reduce the time to recovery from six hours to two hours on virtualized servers that include active directory and base operating systems. “We’ve been able to speed up recovery, and we’re reducing costs with our [offsite] recovery vendor because of the fewer servers that we need,” Abbene says.

After businesspeople saw some of the disaster recovery results, they responded with a collective “Wow,” he says. “They said, ‘This is the fastest we have ever had this up.’”