Traditionally IT Disaster recovery (DR) solutions have been complicated and expensive, or cheap and ineffective. However, virtualisation technology is bringing about a revolution in IT DR, promising dramatically cheaper and more effective solutions.
Drawbacks of traditional disaster recovery provisions
Why have so many organisations historically failed to prepare properly for IT disasters? Well, the fact is that IT disaster recovery (DR) is complicated. Doing it well requires a lot of planning, and you’ll have to keep on updating the plan if it isn’t going to be totally useless by the time you want it. Testing the plan properly is almost never done, as it’s got a tendency to be ruinously time-consuming. This has left many with either cheap inadequate provisions or worse, expensive provisions that fall short of protecting the business.
The drawbacks of traditional approaches are that the solutions that stand a chance of recovering working systems in a reasonable timescale are costly (in fact, depending on your solution, prices can range from the inconveniently pricey to the truly legendary) and those that are cheaper are probably going to mean you will be without working systems for quite a long time. Also the unknown elements in the cheaper alternatives mean that there is little certainty as to how long you will have to wait for working systems.
Making it work in a crisis
Just a word about doing-it-yourself; Beware, running a highly repetitive process, when it’s not obviously needed to be done today, with IT staff who always have other more pressing things to do, can lead to those processes slipping on to back burners. It will almost certainly not get regularly checked or tested. Also if the worst does happen, you need to think if it is best to be solely reliant on your own team. They will probably be up to their eyes trying to deal with the cause of the disaster, or worst of all, may actually be caught up in the disaster itself. There is therefore a good deal of merit to intelligently outsourcing to ensure you can get back your systems quickly and calmly at the height of a crisis.
The promise of virtualisation
Virtualisation as the buzzword of the moment has a lot to live up to, but when it comes to disaster recovery, it really does show some promise. In fact it should be able to solve both the drawbacks of traditional disaster recovery approaches by dramatically reducing costs for vastly more effective, fast recovery solutions.
Virtualisation’s promise comes from its ability to provide a consistent computing environment regardless of the underlying hardware. This means that a system image can be made to work on any hardware, and because of the consolidation advantages of virtualisation, multiple workloads can be run on single physical machines.
So, if your live systems run on a virtual platform already, it is much easier to take your virtualised system images and run them elsewhere on other virtual machines. You still have to make this work in a crisis, but it’s a much easier prospect both to achieve and to practice.
That’s all good, as long as you want to move all your legacy systems onto a virtual platform or have done so already. But what if you haven’t or don’t want to go virtualised? Well, virtualisation can still deliver significant advantages for disaster recovery because it can dramatically reduce the hardware costs for the recovery platform.
As a result you can now purchase products that would allow you to make a virtual warm standby solution from a physical live server. Handy and clever, because this has solved both the drawbacks of traditional methods by being a lot cheaper to implement an effective fast recovery provision.
But with Plan B, virtualisation can offer an even better solution ……
The utopia of a managed service based on virtualisation technology
At Plan B DR, however, we reckon that we’ve got an even better solution than all of the above. By taking the benefits of a virtualised recovery platform, and delivering a managed service around it, we get to build a service that’s greater than the sum of it’s parts.
We put a server appliance in our customer’s network, which takes snapshots of their data on a nightly basis. Our appliance encrypts and ships the snapshots to our systems, where we build and continually update virtual copies of their primary systems. Everything that would need changing to make their systems run in our facility is updated every time we update the data, which means that they’re ready to go immediately (literally as long as they take to boot), should our customers need them.
We don’t like to leave anything to chance, either, so every set of systems is automatically tested, as a set of systems, every day. If something doesn’t work, then we investigate, and either resolve the issue at our end, or point out what’s wrong on the primary server to the customer’s IT team. This automated 100% testing gives complete confidence to our customers that their systems will be there and work in a crisis.
So far, so good – an innovative, robust IT DR solution, that you know will work, is very easy to set up and requires no ongoing effort from the customer’s side. However the advantages don’t stop there; it’s also cost-effective – we’re very highly automated, so we don’t have to spend a lot of engineering overhead per system we protect, and because we can split the hardware costs across a lot of customers, we don’t have to charge a lot for that, either. Our architecture’s scalable, too – if we need to add more oomph to the silos, we just bolt more machines onto the side.
And – here’s some extra magic: Local file backup
Firstly, our appliance stores not only your most recent data, but as many old copies as it can fit. We let our customers use it for local file retrieval, where it functions as a very effective mechanism for ‘give me that spreadsheet back from last week’. And, unlike most backup solutions, because we test our images every day, you can be sure its working. The all-too-common nightmare scenario of ‘I needed this back, and that’s when I discovered that machine hasn’t backed up properly for three months’ just can’t happen to you if you’ve got Plan B DR.
Secondly, because we test every image, every day, we also get to tell you about your own systems. It’s amazingly common that people are operating systems that wouldn’t come back up cleanly when faced with the apparently unreasonable task of asking them all to be rebooted. Most of these problems are easy enough to solve, if you know they’re there in the first place, but most people never test for the scenario, as it’s highly disruptive to normal operations.
So… there’s the utopia. A real IT DR solution that is fast, simple, cost effective and that not only protects your systems should the worst happen, but one that actually makes it less likely that you’ll need it in the first place!
www.PlanBDR.co.uk Tel. 0118 902 6966 Email. info@PlanBDR.co.uk
