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Virtually disaster-proof

Editorial Type: Management     Date: 09-2013    Views: 3655   







Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are hard enough to manage, without the added complexities of increased virtualisation and Big Data infrastructures. Storage magazine examines the issues

A recent report from the Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd (Swiss Re), the world's second largest reinsurance company, revealed that the total costs of disasters from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters totalled $56 billion in the first half of 2013, breaking down to a staggering $307,692,300 a day.

Organisations that fail to embrace disaster recovery solutions and business continuity planning are wasting money and run the risk of jeopardising their future, says Mike Osborne, managing director of Phoenix's Business Continuity Unit: "The figures released by Swiss Re were staggering. To think that the costs of global disasters comes in at $56bn, which can be broken down to almost a quarter of a million dollars a minute is a terrifying thought and hopefully any organisations that have seen this research will have given serious thoughts to the processes they put in place to protect their business."

As Osborne says, this really should bring home the importance of effective business continuity planning. Any organisation that does not undertake such practices currently should use this as a call to action to do so, in order to safe guard their operational and financial futures. But how have disaster recovery and business continuity planning been affected by the increased virtualisation and the emergence of Big Data?

Bill Andrew of Exagrid says: "For decades, the traditional way to store offsite backups has been to make tape copies and vault them offsite. With the move from tape to disk with deduplication well underway, more and more IT organisations are using or considering a disk backup appliance with deduplication for onsite backups and replicating to an offsite system for DR. With this approach, you replicate the backups offsite to another appliance at a second site geographically distant enough to offer disaster recovery (DR) protection. The second site can be one of your own data centres or a rented co-location facility. For those IT organisations where it is not feasible or possible to deploy and manage an offsite disk-based appliance in a remote data centre, an outsourced hybrid cloud-based solution for disaster recovery is a genuine option. The hybrid cloud is a multi-tenancy environment where many customers' data is stored in the hybrid-cloud. This has the advantage of reducing up-front capital costs, eliminating the IT staff management burden for disaster recovery, and obviating the requirement for additional data centre power, cooling and space."

Joe Sluys of Sentronex believes that virtualisation and DR should go hand in hand: "Virtualisation has had a number of positive impacts on the security, risk and cost involved in running a business on a day-to-day level, as well as creating a DR strategy and mapping out a business continuity plan for the long term. In our experience, virtualisation is a trend that has gained much momentum over the past two years. A product of virtualisation is that as businesses make more and more changes to their IT infrastructure, they inevitably turn their attention to business continuity and evaluate how new technology will impact their DR strategies for the future. An example of this could be researching a close proximity, alternative work environment. If an organisation hosts their IT infrastructure virtually and DR is invoked, that business can relocate to temporary office space and have access to business data in a streamlined, much faster manner."

According to Sluys, virtualisation has vastly improved the speed of data recovery. Today, we are consuming, producing and storing more data than ever before and this is only set to continue. Data is becoming the pivotal point to many internal processes therefore the speed at which any section of that big data can be recovered is crucial from a business continuity point of view. Data from a virtual storage space will be recovered much faster than traditional backup methods previously allowed.

From a DR perspective, quick recovery means a decrease in failover time. Should DR be invoked, having business data to hand more quickly means an organisation can be up and running and trading again to within the strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) you agree with your service provider. Downtime costs businesses huge sums of money and virtualisation can help reduce that cost.

Sentronex's Sluys explains: "Hosting server environments in the cloud means lower overheads which, in these economic times, can be a major selling factor for companies looking to future-proof their IT operations. Stating the obvious, opting to virtualise a server reduces the amount of hardware used by a business. In the long term, with less hardware to support, a business will avoid the ever increasing power charges and may even see their power costs decreasing. Finally, with less hardware to power, companies can also reduce their carbon footprint, particularly in the data centre."

By virtualising IT systems and operations, reviewing DR solutions and managing business continuity, an organisation can protect against security breaches, minimize the risk of being unable to access data and can reduce not only on-going running costs, but also help bring down the overall IT spend in the future.

The last word, from Joe Sluys again, is a positive one: "Amongst our clients, there has been a real push towards the virtualisation of IT infrastructure. Cost, security and risk are paramount to this strategic move. It is evidence that DR was indeed a priority for many firms in 2013 and suggests that this precedence is only set to increase as we move to 2014." ST

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