For many organizations, planned outages and impending events account for the vast majority of IT downtime. Upgrading software, planned power outages, replacing hardware components, adjusting system configurations, and other common maintenance activities can result in disruptions that have a serious impact on the business - as do severe weather events and periodic spikes in server workload.

IT organizations need a new business continuity solution to help eliminate downtime related to anticipated data center activity—one that complements existing hardware and software infrastructure and helps deliver the level of availability promised. The solution must not only provide on-demand capability, but built-in automation for virtualized data centers and the cloud.