"There was no backup and recovery plan, which was scary," he says. A former senior recovery specialist at SunGard Availability Services, Johnson knows data recovery. "I have a lot of experience with what works and what doesn't work when it comes to data protection," he explains.

Johnson also knows how easy it is for even the most technologically sophisticated firms to overlook the issue, adding, "Most organizations don't think much about disaster recovery until they need it." NAI Utah was different: its need for a comprehensive data recovery plan was already on its radar screen. In fact, Johnson adds, "Creating it was one of the big reasons I was hired."

NAI Utah is a full-service brokerage with five offices in Utah and an affiliation with NAI Global, a worldwide real estate service network with 375 offices in 55 counties. The firm, founded just 10 years ago, prides itself on its technology. It's known for developing technology-driven programs like Astro--an acronym for Advanced System for Tracking Real Estate Operations--and RealTrac.

• Astro tracks and analyzes real estate property, comparable information and internal office procedures. Complete with ad¬vanced reporting capabilities, ASTRO incorporates a search engine, GIS mapping and opportunities for agents to monitor the status of each deal.
• RealTrac is a service delivery system designed to cut cycle time, boosts efficiency and reduce costs. It includes a public portal, a broker intranet and an insti¬tutional/corporate client intranet, linked across a platform to create seamless connections between buyers, sellers, tenants, NAI brokers and project owners.

Server virtualization has been around since the mainframe days, explains Framingham, MA-based IDC, a global provider of research and advisory services for the technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. But it's taken off in the past decade, and is expected to emerge as one of the killer apps for 2008.

IDC says virtualization is one of the key issues driving IT investment in both midsized and large enterprises. A study by Saugatuck Technology Inc. boasts virtualization will have the single largest effect on IT budgets for hardware and support in the next three years. In a December 2007 report, Saugatuck analyst Charlie Burns notes, "Through 2010, server virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support. The second largest impact will be network virtualization."

NAI Utah uses traditional physical servers only for low priority operations. It runs all of its business-critical data and systems on virtual servers, which handle a network of about 200 users and hosts responsible for all accounting and financial systems.

For companies like NAI Utah, server virtualization technology can reduce the overall cost of IT operations as well as optimize data centers and result in a better allocation of IT resources. But virtualization also poses IT management challenges, notably with respect to backup and data recovery. "Many of the existing solutions are add-on products," Johnson explains. "They weren't designed from the ground up for virtual machines."

When Johnson joined NAI Utah last June, the company kept all business critical data in a high-availability storage area network (SAN). It backed up its virtual servers to SAN and ran a tape backup from there every two weeks, Johnson explains.

But Johnson felt the system would be stronger if he reduced reliance on the SAN and increased the frequency of back-ups. His solution: software specially built for virtual machines. The program, Vizioncore's vRanger Pro, automatically performs nightly differential backups. The differential backup engine only captures changes made since the last full back¬up, which results in fast backups and small, easy to process images.

It generates a confirmation e-mail, which Johnson reviews on arrival each day to confirm the backup was completed.

"The biggest factor was reliability. The second was ease of use," Johnson explains. "I have both."

"What's great about this system is its speed," he continues. "It takes a virtual snapshot of the machine and then creates the backup from that image. That means the machine is only down for about five minutes, the time it takes to create the snapshot. I run the program at night, but I could really run it any time of day because it has such a small impact on the virtual machine."