The pace of data center change is also changing disaster recovery. What once was a planned for and a well-documented process is now more of an ad-hoc fire drill. When disaster strikes, IT scrambles to recover everything as fast as it can but often there is no logical process to follow. Not planning for disaster, not documenting the process and not setting expectations in the form of service level agreements leads users to create their own expectations on recovery, which often have no basis in reality.
In our latest ChalkTalk Video we discuss the importance of planning for disaster.
An essential element in the planning process is placing your applications and data into recovery groups or classes. There is a subset of applications and data that are in use but which in a disaster don’t require immediate recovery. Frequent protection of these applications and data is still required, but they often don’t need fast recovery. In fact, depending on the length and scope of the disaster, IT may never be able to recover them at the DR site. Organizations can store backups of this data on inexpensive, “cheap and deep” disk backup appliances or even tape.
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The next group consists of applications and data that are important to the organization but not critical. The organization needs them, but they don’t need them right away. In most cases a few hours of recovery time is fine. Ideally, the bulk of applications and datasets should be in this group. IT should lobby hard to make that the case. Depending on the application, IT can leverage snapshots and live recovery features to meet the expectations of users.
The final group of applications and data sets are the ones that ARE critical to the business. These applications have to be up in minutes, seconds, and in some cases, they can never go down regardless of the type of disaster. These applications need to leverage continuous data protection, synchronous mirroring between storage systems or even active-active clustering. The principal concern with these level one recoveries is the complexity and the cost.
To learn more about preparing and executing a successful disaster recovery join Storage Switzerland and Commvault for our on demand webinar “How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan That Actually Works”.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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