Data centres, virtualization, disaster recovery - it's a Titanic selection this week from the Reg Library.

Virtualization and its impact on disaster recovery planning

A side effect of virtual machine technology is that when it fails many more things can go wrong. - you could incur downtime of multiple applications. Acknowledging that tape is fine for long term archival, Double Take argues that recovery from tape can be difficult and lengthy, especially if there is a time lag between the disaster and the time the last tape back-up ran.

Double Take cites an article, admittedly from 2004, which notes that 40 per cent of 500 IT managers surveyed were unable to recover data when they needed. And - same 2004 article - 20 per cent of routing nightly backups were unable to recover data when they needed it. Is Doubletake onto something or is it merely recovering old data?

Virtualization: optimized power and cooling to maximize benefits

This one, from APC, is for people who like data centers. The paper argues that virtualization in an existing data center, with no changes to power and cooling infrastructure, always reduces data center efficiency. That's so not cool.

APC explains how this efficiency reduction occurs, how to quantify it and how to prevent it. Lots of interesting facts, lots of diagrams and no sales pitch that we can detect. That's thought leadership, for you.

Data centre automation: Accelerating market maturity through investment in IT

Based on a survey of 164 IT execs, this IDC research note shoehorns data centre automation and virtualization into the same pages. The executive summary is this: "While virtualization continues to spread across the enterprise, process standardization and automation must be utilized to improve IT’s business impact and service delivery efficiency."

HP is the sponsor of this paper: automation is a key business and technology plank for the company. But there is no sales pitch, and plenty of interesting slide action, for comparison purposes. ®