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The common nightmare shared by data centre managers might be slightly different depending on the time of year and the latest headlines. Perhaps a hurricane named Sandy affects one IT leader's sleep, while another stays up nights worrying about a blizzard named Nemo. Regardless of the weather patterns in its region, every enterprise needs a solid disaster recovery (DR) plan - one that accounts for super-storms and super-serious acts of human error or malice. This is a mission-critical task for IT, and it encompasses more than just data backup and protection. To put an end to what-if nightmares, data centre managers need to protect the complete IT services on which their organisations rely.

THE CASE FOR AUTOMATION
Because DR can be such a time-consuming task, many data centre managers push it to the bottom of their to-do lists. This is understandable when there are so many daily demands that seem more pressing. And yet, data centre managers know that they need the insurance DR provides when it comes to business continuity and stemming financial losses in the face of disaster. For most companies, any downtime that lasts for more than four hours leads to painful expense. In too many organisations, that knowledge leads IT administrators to scramble when a disaster occurs; they manually race through the complex, stressful series of steps required to get back up and running. In the mad dash, if one step is overlooked or a mistake is made, the entire process will fail, resulting in a longer delay in recovering IT services.

It shouldn't be this way. When data centre managers properly plan, test and implement DR procedures and solutions that are designed specifically for complex, data-intense environments, they can avoid expensive downtime and stressful dashes to get services back on line. Automated DR addresses many of the nightmare scenarios that have stemmed from DR plans that failed because they weren't executed correctly, because conventional data protection technology couldn't scale to protect IT services, or because the plans weren't thoroughly tested. An automated approach mechanises the time-consuming manual recovery process and allows companies to recover systems within minutes rather than hours or days.

Below are four reasons for data centre managers to embrace automated DR:

1. Organisations can customise automated DR to their environments. Automated DR provides for failover and failback between dissimilar hardware or from physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-virtual, or virtual-to-physical systems. Regardless of the type of servers, hardware or connectivity involved, data centres can rely on automated DR for replication and recovery.

2. Automated DR facilitates end-to-end testing. Comprehensive solutions support complete, in-depth testing of the entire environment, a process IT should complete at least once per quarter. By testing each quarter, IT is assured that all changes to environment are included within recovery process.

3. Automated DR returns to the original point of failure. Data centres need to return to the original point of failure, and truly automated DR solutions provide this capability. For example, automated DR technologies that are integrated with disk-based continuous data protection and snapshot technology allow companies to fully recover in one complete process.

4. Automation enables the rapid restoration of multiple machines. Data centres can restore up to five machines at once and bring back complete IT services in mere minutes. This is a service-oriented approach that integrates systems, applications and data - all the critical data centre components.

There are plenty of nightmare scenarios for data centre managers to fear. Automated DR keeps them at bay. In an environment where downtime translates into weighty financial losses and manual system recovery is too time-intensive and stressful, automation offers a reliable alternative - a soothing insurance plan for the literal and figurative storms that can wreak havoc in a data centre.
More info: www.falconstor.com