Friday, August 21, 2009

In tight economic times it may be difficult to justify building out a remote location with like equipment just for this purpose. Yet, the business impact of downtime due to site failure is significant, if not catastrophic. Sure, the public is forgiving about large scale disasters making news, but the smaller localized disasters like power, cooling, and external network failures may drive customers to a competitor. Such imminent threats have made “site recovery” a critical component in any data center's data protection plans.

How can you reconcile the demand to keep costs under control while ensuring your business’ survival? DataCore Software believes it has the answer with the Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) software.

ASR best fits distributed organizations that are split between a central IT facility and two or more regional branches. It takes advantage of the modest computing, storage and network resources at the remote offices, putting them to use as mini-DR sites where each handles a portion of the overall recovery responsibility. This technique can reduce or eliminate any major hardware or real estate acquisitions typically associated with a DR proposal.

The advanced storage virtualization software removes the need to have like equipment at both ends, fully leveraging the resources already in place. And it keeps

inter-site bandwidth requirements to a minimum by distributing the replication workload over the smaller network links available at the branch offices. 

ASR introduces another important distinction as a solution that is independent of applications, systems hardware, storage devices and operating systems. It works equally well on virtual or physical servers, offering a common disaster recovery process for both.

George Crump, Senior Analyst

ASR distributes the DR workload among several failover groups corresponding to each of the branch locations. The ASR software includes a script customized by solution providers to kick off failover with the click of a button. In the event of a controlled cutover, I/Os are suspended, caches are flushed, the source buffer is flushed, a final synchronization is performed and then a remote start of the remote images are executed. Depending on the speed of the WAN link the entire process should complete in minutes and the data and applications in the remote site will be in a consistent state.

By consolidating these multiple steps into a single click, DataCore has made the DR process simple when the events surrounding the need for activating DR are the most strenuous. This also makes frequent DR testing possible since triggering a test is as simple as clicking a button.

One of the factors often left out of most site recovery products is what to do with the central IT site after everyone has left. Usually the central IT site remains operational, people are moved out of harm’s way but the data center itself survives unscathed. The ASR software as part of the cutover script can make the central site a replication target, keeping it up to date for as long as possible with the many changes being made at the mini-DR sites. By doing so ASR makes the fail back process significantly easier and speeds up central site restoration, which, incidentally, is also scripted for a simple click.

ASR is an important and innovative next step in making disaster recovery more cost effective, more reliable and more approachable. Mere mortals can now implement a realistic disaster recovery plan and more importantly do so with minimal additional cost.