Disaster area?

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The careful nature of operating a business in financially strained times is seeing many organisations invest heavily in business continuity and disaster recovery solutions according to experts. With fear over the damage that downtime or data leaks could cause to a company’s services, finances or reputation, it will be of comfort to many that the technology behind business continuity and disaster recover (BC&DR) is advancing rapidly.

“Certainly clients are more educated about the type of technology out there and the capabilities available to them,” said Citrix Technology’s Patrick Irwin. “Plus, the solutions are getting more robust all the time.”

There was a distinct consensus amongst the industry experts ComputerScope spoke to that when it comes to BC&DR, customers are embracing virtualisation technologies en masse. Jimmy Kehoe, director of sales and marketing with Datapac revealed that as organisations virtualise their infrastructure they gain great flexibility as, “servers essentially become big files that can be moved around the organisation and run on any infrastructure”.

Continued the Kehoe, “This flexibility enables an organisation to easily replicate those files (or servers) to alternate offsite locations without any of the traditional issues associated with physical disaster recovery. Leading providers such as VMware, Microsoft, Double Take or Veeam are now providing much more cost effective solutions for businesses of all sizes.

“For larger organisations, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) from VMware fully integrates with their storage replication to automate the failover to an alternate site in case of a disaster – it even creates the disaster recovery ‘Run Book’,” said Kehoe. “Veeam and Double Take replication technologies are affordable for the smallest of businesses, who wish to copy their virtual environment off site.”

Richard O’Brien, IT director with Triangle also mentioned how Veeam has taken advantage of these features to offer offsite backup, replication and continuous data replication

“These additional virtualisation features combined with low-cost NAS storage enable very cost-effective BC&DR options,” he added, “and continue to drive customers to virtualise all of their x86 estate, including desktop.”

REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY
Renaissance MD, Michael Conway commented that a bullet-proof BC&DR solution is certainly a “more achievable” goal as virtualised environments become the norm. He added that, “People aren’t just putting in place solutions that do the job easier but they’re also getting systems that are easier to recover and easier to rebuild.”

“For me,” he added, “the other thing in terms of BC&DR technology that’s made an impact in the past year is that more and more people are putting in replication technology themselves. In fact they’re putting in place replicated diverse technologies themselves. Putting their live production systems in a full-blown proper data centre and backing them up themselves in their own normal live operating environment.”

Taking up the baton for the virtualisation argument was sales engineering director with Dell, Kevin Swan. He made the point that the, “adoption of open standards on the compute and storage levels which enable virtualisation of the infrastructure stack” is a major positive.

Explaining further, he said that this is another way of allowing customers to address BC&DR issues like replication of data as well as simplifying recovery procedures. This in turn reduces recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). In addition, said Swan, it “minimises infrastructure and application downtime in case of a corruption or disaster recovery event”.

Swan also noted that these types of technology solutions help customers to easily test their failover scenarios to ensure data consistency, application failover, network access and “most importantly” user access to prioritised systems.

WORKFORCE CONTINUITY
Irwin of Citrix added that, “There’s a preference out there for centralising IT and making it independent of the location of the worker-be that at home, in the office, a branch office or with a customer. They want to get the business tools in their hands. The big overall theme is really workforce continuity.”

He continued, “Workforce continuity brings inherent security issues though. Your workers are sitting at their home PC and getting access to their work desktop, effectively they’ve got all the corporate data and all the customer confidential material they need, and all with access to that from a device that’s not owned by the organisation.

“One of the beauties of desktop virtualisation is that this data actually never leaves the data centre though. The data is never on the device, they’re seeing a view of it. It’s not getting passed down to a device; they’re getting a pixel-by-pixel representation of a screen that’s in the data centre. It’s very valuable as a security approach.”

MITIGATING RISK
The reliance on virtualisation as a cure for all that ails can have a negative impact in terms of BC&DR though. Francis O’Haire, technical director, Data Solutions, stated that server virtualisation “does mean putting more eggs in one basket”. The failure of an individual physical server, he added, will most likely affect the running of several functions rather than the “historical non-virtualised case of only a single workload being affected”.

O’Haire continued, “For example, a single physical server could be hosting a company’s e-mail, database and file server-all of which will fail if the hardware fails. To mitigate against this risk there are some very innovative solutions available from such companies as Marathon Technologies. Their everRun MX solution will protect the virtual machines to such a degree that a server failure will have zero impact on them.”

O’Haire would also make the point that since a virtual server infrastructure is usually connected to a Storage Area Network (SAN), to allow for the migration of workloads between servers, this also becomes a “single point of failure” if it’s not appropriately protected and replicated. “DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V is an ideal solution for this,” said O’Haire. “It allows organisations to create a powerful SAN from any off-the-shelf servers, disks and connectivity cards (whether it’s fibre or iSCSI) at a fraction of the cost of a traditional proprietary storage product.”

CHANGE-BLOCK TRACKING
Neil Stone-Wigg, chief technology officer with Trilogy Technologies told ComputerScope that to his mind the major development in the BC&DR space of late is “the ability to offer change-block tracking”.

This, he explained, allows you “to narrow down the backup requirements to only those ‘blocks’ that have changed. This, more than anything, opens up the opportunities for transferring all data and system changes offsite over DSL lines.”

Triangle’s O’Brien was another who emphasised this area saying that the introduction of change block tracking from VMware has enabled businesses to operate an “incremental forever backup-policy, with a much reduced backup data volume”.

Meanwhile, Aiden Callaly, VP for global sales with MXSweep commented that archiving is another increasingly popular element of BC&DR. “If there’s one major trend that’s stood out for me in the past year that’s definitely it,” he said.

“We’re starting to see a lot more requests for archiving services,” continued Callaly. “For instance, legally speaking you have to keep your e-mail archived-for business like legal practices or financial institutions that’s something they can’t help but take seriously.”

“Archiving solutions are gaining a lot of attention and it’s now possible to offer archiving in the cloud, storing up to ten years e-mail in some cases-these archiving facilities can be accessed by desktop or Blackberry.”

Elsewhere, integration technologies were the focus of Fergal Hennigan’s attention. The business development manager with MJ Flood Technology noted that in the past many organisations would have used individual agents and applications to manage backups, replication and business continuity. “However, with CA for example, these tasks have now been integrated into a single management console and can be managed from one dashboard, again reducing complexity and administration for the IT department,” said Hennigan.

FUTURE
Unsurprisingly, with the bulk of business information living within the cloud these days, the future of BC&DR is also, for many industry experts, rooted in cloud based conversation. For instance, Trilogy’s Stone-Wigg announced that as cloud computing will continue to be the “de-facto route” for infrastructure solutions, “all BC&DR technologies will focus on how to improve their cloud offerings”.

He claimed that the technologies that will win in this battle are those that allow the solution to be implemented in the most seamless and unobtrusive manner. “All consumers are looking for straightforward BC&DR solutions that tick every box relating to ultra-fast RTO and RPO,” he added.

Datapac’s Kehoe meanwhile explained that a number of independent cloud-based backup providers are launching cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. With cloud mentions coming thick and fast, Digital Mines MD David Byrne was next up. Carefully trying not to go overboard, he commented that, “I think we’ll see businesses move away from disaster recovery concerns and more towards pure business continuity as they take advantage of cloud services.

“Recovery is not really the core plan,” he added, “in fact, it’s more about continuity in the event of a failure of one or more components of the deployment – but really the business services should always be available.”

A “hybrid cloud computing model” was the focus of attention for Hennigan. He felt that customers are now looking to mix private and public clouds to meet data protection needs for their services. Customers are mitigating risks by replicating their backup data off-premise to a third party. They are “utilising asynchronous replication over hardware-based replication solutions offer more flexibility with no vendor lock-in,” explained the MJ Flood-man.

LEGISLATION
MXSweep’s Callaly was one of many to comment that BC&DR technology will have to move on “purely for legislation reasons if nothing else”. Elaborating, he noted that new UK data legislation will see companies be liable for “around

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