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A multi platform datacenter is no longer an exception and in fact has become quite normal. There was a time long ago and far away when most datacenters were pretty homogeneous. All of the “stuff” residing there typically came from one vendor. This made things pretty easy to manage. One set of instructions to learn, one phone number to call if anything went wrong, et cetera. The problem was that this “stuff” also carried a massive price tag and was called a mainframe.

Along the way a bunch of engineers and innovative companies (mostly out of California for some reason) started to design much cheaper processors allowing other folks to built real servers out of PC components. These used a new set of common standards, and their cost was had a much lower barrier for entry for even small organizations. Large organizations took advantage as well, and both had a buffet of building huge datacenters with these x86 building blocks. Some call this the golden age of the data center. Other more boring folks called this the client server model. We call them analysts.

All this made datacenter strategy was simple. Need more apps, just buy more servers. They were cheap so why not? This created a problem; all these servers took up way too much space and used way too much power, and most of the server resources weren’t even being used. The solution to this was called virtualization. Virtualization allowed datacenters to consolidate back to a more manageable size and footprint.

The problem is that all of these changes overlapped. Nothing actually ever went away completely. Datacenters just got a bit smaller, or things got moved “over there”.

What is left today is a typical datacenter. A datacenter built up over the years with multiple flavors of platforms and vendors. A little bit of mainframe, a little bit of x86, and these days a whole lot of virtual.

But what happens if the power goes out? Well unfortunately that means a little bit of this, and a little bit of that for recovery planning as well. One plan for the mainframe, one for Linux servers, one for Windows servers, and probably a virtual recovery plan too.

Read more by downloading the FREE eBook – 5 Things you need to know about disaster recovery planning

It is a handy guide to help understand the new face of disaster recovery today.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.