owenhollandsI once assisted an organisation write a policy for DR testing that had approximately 1,500 applications in its DR register. This is for an organisation that at the time only had approximately 7,000 servers. A large proportion of these where used to provide identity management and file share services, and some large applications required a disproportionate number of servers, so there were several hundred applications that only ran on one server. If they were physical, one server in production, and a cold standby at DR. As with most enterprises, very few servers ran more then one application, and applications with small CPU and memory requirements were virtualised.
Another telecommunication organisation I know had about 300 applications that required DR. I don’t know how many of these were single application/single server, but based on my experience I would guess between 1/3 to 1/2.
Compare this to the webscale organisations. How many apps do twitter, ebay and facebook have? How many servers? It can be argued that public cloud providers run many thousands of applications, but the reality is that the cloud provider has no responsibility for the application.
The fact is, in the corporate or enterprise world, many applications don’t need to scale beyond a single server, and in fact benefit more from virtual server consolidation then scale out (see my other blog post on VMware vs. Public Cloud).
While I am happy to be contradicted, I think this is a large target market that is currently underserved.
Owen Hollands.