Click to enlargeIn order for being competitive in contemporary business world, companies must have strong and reliable mechanisms to provide data availability and security. It means that they should pay big attention to such a point as disaster recovery that can guarantee constant access to mission-critical applications and information.
Disasters mean not only acts of nature, but also – and even in a greater degree – human factor: carelessness, incaution and even malicious damage (people all over the world were terrified by the terroristic act and after-effects of Sept. 11, 2001, and professionals of different areas understood how vulnerable our data infrastructure was). Another side of the problem is unsafeness of hardware and lack of software stability. In any failure situation caused by any of these reasons data loss can be catastrophically destructive for the business. That is why disaster recovery planning value hardly can be overestimated.
As you can suppose, high-grade disaster recovery plan touches not only disasters in themselves, but many other important areas such as data high availability or redundancy. Both these features can be ensured by deploying a SAN – Storage Area Network. In respect to small and mid-size business, an iSCSI SAN should be deployed – it is much more affordable solution than FC SAN, but it provides all the features needed for data availability and security.
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Click to enlargeServer virtualization technologies such as those based on Microsoft Hyper-V or VMWare have revolutionized the deployment of hardware and software resources for many organizations. This is especially true in the case of remove disaster recovery environments, wherein rapid failover and spin-up in the event of some catastrophic interruption of production servers is a requirement. Utilizing a virtualization solution can mean that fewer physical servers need to be deployed and maintained, which obviously translates into a simpler environment that is more cost-effective to maintain. The following frequently asked questions (FAQs) attempt to address both the advantages and disadvantages of a virtualized DR plan using Hyper-V or VMWare.
What effect does virtualization have on a disaster recovery plan?
There are obviously positive and potentially not-so-positive effects to using virtualization as part of a disaster recovery plan. In a complex clustered environment, virtualization clustering options add an extra layer of complexity in addition to the obvious advantages that such a configuration also provides. Furthermore, one could also say that planning for replication of the VMs and their data storage is also an additional complexity. However, even in a purely physical DR environment, a similar sort of server configuration replication and data replication approach would need to be in place.
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Click to enlargeMicrosoft Hyper-V is a leading virtualization platform that supports advanced clustering and failover of virtual machines running on the hypervisor. Hyper-V can also be used to implement a disaster recovery plan in order to ensure continued business operations in the event of some catastrophic interruption or unavailability of your normal production server environment. This could include weather events, power grid failures, terrorist attacks, or even a system virus outbreak. If you have decided on Hyper-V as your virtualization platform and know your business requirements for a disaster recovery plan, it is important to understand how to prepare properly your hardware, networks, and replication environment.
Configuration of the server environment is one of the more time-consuming aspects of any disaster recovery site planning and setup phase. By definition, the environment needs to physically remote and selecting this location is obviously of critical importance. Remote offices with adequate server space and network bandwidth can be the best option for many but before deciding on this, several additional items should be thought through. For example, in the event of some sort of catastrophic event, is it possible that the remote office could also be a victim of the same event (if the remote office is also a critical business location, a terrorist attack could also target it).
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Click to enlargeFor decades, extremely large information technology organizations such as governments, Fortune 100 businesses, and large financial institutions, have had plans in place to perform a “business failover” in the event of some disaster that disrupted business operations. These events could come in the form of a building fire, widespread power grid failure in a city, natural disasters in the form of major winter storms, tornadoes, fires, and hurricanes, or even a terrorist attack. As terrorist attacks on businesses and government facilities in particular have risen around the world over the past 10 years, disaster recovery has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have item for even medium-sized businesses. This is also obviously driven by the fact that organization’s data and information technology infrastructure has moved from something they used in the course of a normal day’s work to the absolute core of many businesses enterprises – without this infrastructure, the business is effectively down.
Recently, the trend towards virtualized environments such as those based on technologies such as Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMWare have highlighted the requirement to have also a disaster recovery plan in place for your virtualized systems running on virtual machines as well.
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