The new face of disaster recovery

Continuous data protection, wide-area file services and managed backup services help companies get their businesses back online faster amid disaster.

By Deni Connor , Network World , 05/08/2006

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Click to see: Jason Hamlett, IT manager for Fulcrum Pharma Development

Jason Hamlett was caught by surprise last December when an oil depot explosion destroyed space his company was about to move into and knocked out its existing office and data center nearby while firefighters battled the ferocious blaze. The Buncefield fire burned for several days and was the largest to hit Europe in peacetime.

Fortunately, Hamlett, IT manager for drug manufacturer Fulcrum Pharma Development, was able to keep his business operating using a new means of disaster recovery - a combination of wide-area file services (WAFS) and continuous data protection (CDP).

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With offices in Morrisville, N.C., and Tokyo, Hamlett is well aware of the threats posed by hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters. He and many others have adopted new software or hardware technologies to protect their companies' business-critical data.

Customers have traditionally deployed remote replication hardware, software or services and tape-based backups with off-site storage to protect their enterprise data and provide business continuity for their organizations. They're now complementing replication or replacing it entirely with CDP, WAFS or business-continuity appliances or software.

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These technologies help them recover data faster and meet their recovery-time objective - the period within which systems, applications or functions must be recovered after an outage. Applications and data critical to the operations of the business, such as transaction-intensive databases, ERP and CRM systems, may need almost instant recovery to keep the business running. Other systems, such as e-mail or less-critical SQL databases, may fit into a secondary recovery scenario.

In case of emergency
Here are some tips for ensuring a successful recovery of business-critical applications:

•	Inventory your applications and determine a recovery-point objective and recovery-time objective for each. Consider what the reponse would be to environmental disasters, deliberate disruption of service, loss of utilities and system failure.
•	Select a person who will administer the disaster-recovery and business- continuity plan.
•	Communicate and train staff on the business continuity process.
•	Document the business-continuity plan and store a copy in an off-site location.
•	Test the disaster-recovery plan and backups and recoveries regularly to make e sure that they work properly.
•	Reassess and update the plan regularly.

Click to see:

Reliance on replication

Enterprise-size businesses typically look to replication or mirroring technologies to protect their most business-critical data. Using these technologies, customers can deploy equipment and software in local and remote locations that replicates or saves changes to data off-site, where it is protected and can be recovered in the event of a disaster.

Synchronous replication software, which requires an acknowledgment to each transmission of data and often requires expensive equipment, fits at the top of the data-recovery continuum, where recovery needs to take place in minutes or seconds.