Disaster Recovery and the Cloud
Posted on Sun, Aug 29, 2010
Author: Neil Longmuir
As the number of companies utilizing virtualization grows, the driving force behind this growth is without a doubt the resulting increase in hardware utilization and in turn the lower IT cost via the sheer consolidation of physical assets. With fewer assets to purchase and maintain year on year, companies can easily see the benefits and their affect on the balance sheet.
Other forces have now arisen which are driving the increase in the use of virtualization. Of all the services being offered within the new 'pay-for-use' IT service model known as the Cloud, “the notion of recovering your critical IT components and services from disaster by using Cloud Computing”, is one of the most compelling reasons for organizations to finally stop treating DR (Disaster Recovery) and BC (Business Continuity) as a nice to have.
When organizations start to seriously consider the cost of securing their critical data & services against the feared 'disaster event', the fact that multiple technologies and paradigms offer differing levels of recovery is not comforting to IT executives.
Traditionally when the analysis of DR technologies begins, the cost of a solution is typically a function of two critical facets; the organization's tolerance to;
- data loss during an outage.
- downtime of normal business operations during an outage.
With the process of virtualizing their IT infrastructures already begun, Cloud customers today take advantage of the Protection & Recovery service that enables multi-tenant customer infrastructures to be replicated continuously to a secondary data centre for the purpose of recovering from disaster events. In addition, non-resident Scalar customers who have their own private cloud are able to use Scalar vDR as a target for data replication and hence a site for recovery. Coupled with proven recovery processes, the vDR product empowers Scalar customers with the ability to recover from disaster no matter where their infrastructure resides.
Fundamental to vDR, replication of data at the block level requires technology that’s commonly provided by Enterprise Storage vendors. The replication (or snapshotting) process coupled with quiescent agents (via application APIs) maintain datastore and application context.
What this all means is that the SLAs (service level agreement) which, typically drove the solution and therefore the costs can be met more easily and hence at considerably lower costs than traditional DR methodology.
Comments welcome and for a detailed technical walk-through of vDR and its benefits, don’t hesitate to contact me.