In this presentation we present EAGLE's ideas on designing a modern disaster recovery environment. Key concepts include balancing cost, risk and complexity in DR strategies. Most notably we'll cover recovery objectives, common DR technologies (that allow you to backup and pre-position data), and the importance of viewing DR as an insurance policy.
Common DR Technologies that allow you to pre-place data.
There are many reasons for this spike in disaster declarations; one of which is undoubtedly the growing sensitivity we have towards the impact of environmental factors on our national infrastructure. Computer technology has become a critical component for the way businesses manage their supply chain, market and sell to customers, as well as communication.
Don’t turn a deaf ear… do you know if your organization is actually protect?
- Took over DC -> no VM backups… SQL jobs were inconsistent… Primary San as target… tape library next to it
Laggard: a person who makes slow progress and falls behind others.
The cost of downtime is greatly increasing! There has been a 38% increase in the cost per hour of downtime. Interestingly enough, 42% of “best-in-class” reported no outages in the last year. Not all companies can afford, or need, the infrastructure that is required for “best-in-class” performance, but even moving to the middle of the pack can save your business a lot of cash.
DR is a focus, but the fiscal backing is not there to do much about it
Research shows that improving disaster recovery is a top focus for most companies.
Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management, system backups, change control, and help desk. Business continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster; Business Continuity refers to those activities performed daily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability.
The foundation of business continuity are the standards, program development, and supporting policies; guidelines, and procedures needed to ensure a firm to continue without stoppage, irrespective of the adverse circumstances or events. All system design, implementation, support, and maintenance must be based on this foundation in order to have any hope of achieving business continuity, disaster recovery, or in some cases, system support. Business continuity is sometimes confused with disaster recovery, but they are separate entities. Disaster recovery is a small subset of business continuity. It is also sometimes confused with Work Area Recovery (due to loss of the physical building which the business is conducted within); which is but a part of business continuity.
The term Business Continuity describes a mentality or methodology of conducting day-to-day business, whereas business continuity planning is an activity of determining what that methodology should be. The business continuity plan may be thought of as the incarnation of a methodology that is followed by everyone in an organization on a daily basis to ensure normal operations.
We’ll be discussing backup and disaster recovery specifically today. BC planning is very complicated, and has as much to do with people as it does with technology.
RPO = Snapshots
RTO = Replication
RPO/RTO are separate…
- each application can have different RPOs & RTOs
Webfarm = high RPO / low RTO (must be online 24/7)
PO App = low RPO (cannot lose data) / higher RTO (paper form until servers are up)
(Joking) At Eagle, we love it when you don’t do you homework & have a gut reaction to wanting a 0/0 b/c it costs a lot of $$... Only joking, we would actually take the time to help educate you to make the best decision for your environment.
**add defined lines between technology solutions, add numbers to them, describe what you are about to do
Disaster Recovery is not just for storage, you typically need to factor servers, networks, workstations, and mobile devices. We are going to focus on storage for this presentation however.
Who is doing this?
Who’s doing this?
Higher level of Intelligence about your environment --> invidual VM restores / Workflow automation
More layers to the onion to troubleshoot
Who’s doing this?
Who’s doing this?
Not really adequate for modern growing datasets
Who’s doing this?
Transitioned from Backup to Archive
- cost effective
- easiest to get offsite (trunk of car – “offsite” is actually “onsite” from 8-5… Iron mtn)
RTO is killed (restore times are unfeaseable)
Who’s doing this?
No different than tape (for restoring purposes)
- do the math or put a TB in the cloud & try to recover it
- Dataset / internet pipe = recovery time
So many options! What is right for you depends heavily on you budget, your data, and your service-level agreements.
Stick on this a little bit longer so folks can consume the content.
Ask for questions here.
Your site may dictate which DR technologies you can leverage.
Mention the 3-2-1
Mention the 3-2-1
Until your organization understands the size and scope of any potential impact in cannot define a DR plan that makes good business sense. Investing a hundred thousand dollars into your DR plan only makes sense if the cost of a business interruption is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars as well.
What is the cost of being out of business for 4 hours? Your DR solution needs to make business sense, otherwise you are just spending money and playing with technology.
Don’t fall into the trap of disconnecting DR solutions from what makes good business sense. “Try not to get enamored with tech and a 35 second RTO”.
Pick the right technology! A spare no expense approach does not make good business sense. Don’t fall victim to becoming enamored by technology and near-zero recovery objectives.
Balancing cost against the time to recover (RTO) requires an in-depth understanding of your application’s RTO/RPO requirements and the technologies needed to meet them.
My point is not to encourage folks to cheap-out on DR, there are justifiable use cases for architecting around zero time recovery objectives. What we do at EAGLE is attempt to understand your environment so we can architect something that makes good business sense.
Mention my async blunder; ask if anyone else has screwed-up like that.
Ask for questions here.
Operational efficiency is typically where large cost savings are realized.
Successful companies embrace a multi-tiered catalog of recovery technologies connected by a unified management platform. This approach enables IT departments to continuously balance cost vs. risk and protect data accordingly.
Let me know if you want a copy of the presentation!
Reiterate: The way we see it, our job is to take the complex and make it simple… that means adding real value by leveraging our expertise and integration capabilities to help you find a solution that makes sense for your business. And now, with our new solutions, if that means customer-managed \ on-prem, Eagle-managed \ Eagle-prem, or somewhere between, we have you covered.