Strategies for delivering disaster recovery solutions for the modern datacentre (page 1 of 3)

What if a virus infiltrated your systems? If the communications lines to your primary datacentre went down then what effect would this have? How would a corruption to your main corporate database impact your operation?

These are all things that can and do hit organisations and businesses around the world on a regular basis, and when they do the knock on effects can be enormous. When disaster strikes can you be sure that your organisation is ready to recover and to do so quickly?

Many companies are gambling with their survival and viability through failing to carry out the necessary steps to protect against disaster and to ensure quick recovery when it does strike.

Gartner Group states that datacentres are experiencing a 50-80% compound annual growth rate increase in data volumes. At the same time, economic pressures are driving the centralisation and consolidation of data, servers and storage back into the datacentre. In essence, the technology available and the economic landscape is driving companies to put more data, of ever increasing importance and criticality in one central location. And the amount of data is further increasing the size of the risk.

This "all the eggs in one basket" approach may make savings by allowing companies to manage more for less but it also hugely increases a company's risk. If they lose a datacentre then they lose everything.

So how do you avoid the dangers of critical data loss, long recovery times and potentially massive financial losses that can be associated with a disaster - be it a local hardware problem or a complete site loss?

It is very important to make sure that you have a disaster tolerant infrastructure in place, in order to build a disaster recovery plan that allows you avoid many problems before they occur. Most importantly, you need a plan that will ensure the fastest possible recovery when faced with a disaster.

The Modern Datacentre
With flat or shrinking IT budgets and growing data volumes businesses are increasingly deploying storage networking and virtualisation technology to allow them to share and make more efficient use of existing hardware investment.

This centralised datacentre approach generally means that there are different applications for different departments running on different platforms. There are different types of storage from different vendors with different characteristics in terms of performance, resilience and recoverability. And not every one of these applications for these departments has the same requirement for storage. They don't all need highly performant storage or the most resilient storage.

As VERITAS have developed solutions to help organisations achieve a centralised datacentre approach, they have also worked with customers to develop a new methodology to take make best use of this environment.

The Quality of Storage Service model or QoSS looks at the data from the applications perspective. It recognises that a development server, for example, may not have the same storage requirement as your e-commerce server. It may not have the same backup requirement. It might not need five nines availability. It may not have the same business impact, if it were down for a few hours, as other departments and their applications. For example, it may not be necessary to replicate all that data from your development server to the other side of the world, while at the same time it may be vital to do so for your Oracle database or your e-business server.

So when planning your strategy for disaster recovery and disaster protection in the modern datacentre it makes absolute sense to invest prudently.