Suppliers Prep for Pandemic

Hurricane season might be grabbing the headlines, but firms are quietly preparing for the potential ravages of another major threat: an Avian Flu pandemic. The threat has prompted a flurry of activity from vendors such as VMware and IBM.

Speaking during a keynote at yesterday's EMC analyst day, VMware president Diane Greene said pandemic preparations are well underway, with many businesses already making plans for staff to work from home.

Many firms, she said, are using VMware products to secure their workers and centrally manage remote desktops and laptops. "An area where we have seen a lot of growth is in hosting desktop environments."

Toward this end, VMware last year unveiled the latest version of Workstation, its desktop virtualization software, which links up with the supplier's GSX and ESX Server products. (See VMware Intros Workstation.) More recently, VMWare has teamed up with thin computing specialist Wyse and set up an industry alliance in an attempt to build virtual desktop offerings with other hardware and software vendors. (See Wyse Collaborates With VMware, VMware Intros Alliance , and Kane County Consolidates.)

Since the first outbreak of Avian Flu, U.S. businesses have had to seriously rethink their disaster recovery strategies, with many staff members potentially forced to work from home, either through illness, transport problems, or the need to care for family members. According to the recently launched U.S. Pandemic Implementation Plan, up to 40 percent of a typical firm's workforce could be absent for two weeks or longer.Avian Flu, which is also known as H5N1, has claimed over 100 victims, mainly in Asia. At the moment, it is difficult for one person to pass the virus to another, although there are fears that H5N1 could mutate, causing a global pandemic reminiscent of the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed 20 million people around the world.

VMWare is not the only vendor that has identified a need to prepare for the worst. Earlier this week IBM unveiled its Contingency Planning Assessment (CPA) initiative, aimed at helping firms keep their businesses up and running in the event of an outbreak. According to IBM, the service involves a review of a users' pandemic response plans based on guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (See IBM Prepares for Pandemics and IBM Forms Pandemic Initiative.)

IBM's service, which will be available later this month, checks users' business continuity plans for their IT and network infrastructures. Two versions of the service are on offer: one for small and medium-sized businesses, which is priced between $10,000 and $35,000, and one for enterprises costing from $50,000 to $150,000.

IBM has also enhanced the disaster recovery features within its new DB2 database offering, unveiled today, to help users cope with situations such as a pandemic. (See IBM Unveils DB2 9.)

Jeff Jones, director of strategy for information management and software at IBM, told Byte and Switch that DB2 9 offers more automation around the recovery of data, which will enable faster disaster recovery.DB2 9 (code-named "Viper") is apparently easier to use. Tables of information are now grouped together for backup purposes. "You no longer have to rely on lots of individual table back-ups to rebuild the database," explains Jones. "You would feel the benefit of that at a time like a pandemic."

Earlier this year, a top U.S. disaster preparedness expert warned that firms could face a major challenge finding the staff to keep their systems up and running in the wake of an Avian Flu outbreak. Users have already admitted that getting access to back-end servers and storage could be a problem with key staff out sick, although some used last year's New York transit strike as an opportunity to hone their disaster plans for remote workers. (See CIOs Ponder Potential Pandemic.)

Michael Dortch, principal business analyst at Robert Frances Group, told Byte and Switch that few firms have tackled the issue of disaster recovery, let alone prepared for a pandemic. "Most disaster recovery and business continuity efforts are so anemic they need to be on life support," he says, adding that individual technologies are useless without a broader disaster recovery strategy.

Prices for IBM's DB2 9, which will be available on July 28th, start at $4,874 per processor or $165 per user.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: