[BreachExchange] How to do disaster recovery without disrupting your business operations

[Audrey McNeil]

http://www.information-age.com/technology/security/123461391/how-do-disaster-recovery-without-disrupting-your-business-operations


At first glance, ‘disaster’ might seem an extreme word to use in connection
with a sudden and unexpected data loss. After all, it’s not a crash or an
earthquake, nobody has died. But it’s not overstating the case to suggest
that data loss can be an extinction event for a business.

The National Archives & Records Administration in Washington reported that
'93% of companies that lost their data centre for 10 days or more due to a
disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster'. It added
that '50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for
this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.'

No wonder so many organisations and businesses are implementing disaster
recovery (DR) strategies to try and ensure that they will survive any
unforeseen emergency. Unfortunately, successful DR can be difficult and
disruptive without the right tools.

Too often, data recovery is viewed as restoring accidentally deleted files
but it’s far more complicated than that. For instance, do you know where
the data is, how critical it is and how it should be protected? What
policies are in place to determine how different types of data are
protected, how often they are backed up and how many copies are kept, how
long are they kept for and how quickly does the data need to be restored?

It’s complicated

Data recovery can be a complex process involving multiple storage arrays
and data protection solutions. In many cases, data protection and recovery
systems are managed based on disks or LUNs rather than applications or
virtual machines.

But companies need flexibility in data protection and recovery. With
servers and applications moving from physical hosts to virtual hosts to the
cloud, organisations need their data protected wherever it’s running.

Recovery is not just complex, it can be expensive too. In many cases,
organisations are forced to use a number of different tools to recover
files, disks, systems, or the entire site.

Companies frequently purchase data recovery for SAN/NAS systems, physical
server backup tools, virtualisation backup tools, cloud backup tools and
more. Each one of those tools has its own management interface and licence.
If organisations could reduce the number of tools required in their data
recovery infrastructure, they could reduce their costs significantly. The
optimum data recovery system with the lowest complexity and cost would work
across the entire infrastructure.

There are varying degrees of recovery, therefore businesses need the
flexibility to choose from a number of options to recover back to the exact
source if required, or recover the contents of a physical server to a
virtual machine or vice versa. The process also has to be fully validated
so that organisations are reassured that a recovery operation was completed
and performed without errors.

Businesses should be able to protect physical and virtual environments with
a single platform. They should also be able to perform a recovery operation
anytime, anywhere and from any device and they should be able to access
their data whether it’s on a physical or virtual host or in the cloud.

Unfortunately, most DR systems are too complex and fragmented and rely on a
siloed array by array, site by site, application by application based
approach.

What can be done?

A more effective DR approach would provide a common methodology that would
eliminate silos in favour of common capabilities across the entire
infrastructure accessible via a single interface.

One way to achieve this is via software-defined storage (SDS) which creates
an abstraction layer above the hardware and below the OS and application.
Virtualising the underlying storage enables it to be managed and recovered
via a single common interface.

A common platform enables automation of the DR process and speeds up the
ability to recover files, databases, systems and entire sites. It enables
proactive centralised monitoring, analytics and configuration across
heterogeneous storage infrastructures.

Snapshots can significantly reduce or eliminate backup windows and recover
data to any point and to dissimilar hardware. This makes it possible to
convert from physical to virtual environments on-the-fly or even convert
virtual to different virtual. This can reduce recovery time to a reboot
where administrators can mount the device and grab a single image or file.

Performing DR in the abstraction layer provides organisations with
policy-based, audited, validated recovery that can be performed to and from
physical, virtual, or mixed environments. It brings peace of mind that the
data is protected and fully recoverable.

The flexibility of the environment also provides organisations with
bootable and mobile snapshots for instant recovery. They can test a
disaster recovery plan without affecting business operations and protect
appliances and data without hurting the performance of their servers or the
SAN.

A storage abstraction layer can seamlessly take advantage of different
storage media with different characteristics and price points. The DR
strategies for modern scale out solutions require a different approach
compared to legacy DR.

Because of the size and volume required for scale out, many DR strategies
revolve around data replication and keeping replicated data online on the
cheapest online media possible.

An abstracted storage management environment can easily facilitate the
needed functionality at the right price point to enable a more agile DR
strategy for scale-out data centers.

In other words, virtualising the storage layer enables the abstraction of
disaster from recovery.
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