Leading Edge Technology Products Overview | Leading Edge Technology & Network Solutions

Site to Site Disaster Recovery Solution

The Business Objective:

To protect the key business applications and information from being unavailable during a Disaster. To enable smooth failover of servers/data between Primary and DR sites with minimal technical envolvement to actual make the servers available via their new network.

Nice To Haves:

To be able to tailor the individual level of protection for different sections of infrastructure based on its criticality.
To empower a senior executive with the ability to decide when to failover and instigate this with just a few mouse clicks.
Protecting keys systems is ok, but if my building has burned down it would be good to also have the option of bringing the remaining less critical systems online within a few days.

Solution:

The question asked of many IT Departments in the current climate is:

“how quickly would we be up and running if the worst happened?”

An interesting question, but first of all you need to define what “the worst” means (or the word “Disaster” ) so that you can establish everyone is talking about the same situation. The goal however is usually the same which h is to have a “ready to go” up to date copy of your critical systems at another site.

Secondly the question in reply is:

“how much will it cost us to be without our IT infrastructure?”

This cost is ultimately the way risk versus budget is calculated and consequently is how Disaster Recovery is costed.

The great news about disaster recovery is that, what was a nightmare question is now solved with a simple solution when using a blend of technology available from several Tier One vendors.

The base concept is that “it is great to virtualize!!” , but you have heard that already I’m sure?

One of the last features of virtualization ever mentioned is that the Virtual Server images are stored as flat files. These flat files behave like any other collection of files, they can for example be copied from one place to another and then restarted. It is this fantastic but underrated feature that makes Disaster Recovery so easy to conquer once you have virtualized your critical business infrastructure.

Using VM ware to run your infrastructure means that you typically need some shared storage, choosing the right vendor for this storage is critical because it is here that all your data and virtual server images will be stored. So for local business continuity reasons alone you need it to be reliable, flexible and easily managed. NetApp offer storage appliances that cover all of the aforementioned but also offer an important extra, the NetApp FAS appliances offer deduplication at block level which when combined with their market leading Snap Mirror site to site replication technology means that we can build an incredibly efficient site to site storage replication solution that is as light as possible on the amount of bandwidth it requires.

Ok so we’ve got replicated storage covered with NetApp Snap Mirror, but the next component is the part that makes the whole solution very efficient. VM ware Site Recovery Manager has a storage connector that links with Snap Mirror so that your Virtual Centre Management Server is storage aware. In the event that you need to fail over your Virtual Centre knows where all your replicated servers are and is able to execute a planned fail over making all the required addressing and local setting changes automatically. It is in fact possible to fail over with out having any technical resource to hand meaning your CEO/MD can make the decision and execute it.

Key Business Benefits

Leverage more value from your virtual environment
Lower the cost of protecting your infrastructure with simple administration
Introduce up to the minute DR protection for key business applications like SQL, Oracle, SAP & Exchange
Enable board level control over the decision to failover between sites .
Carry out regular non disruptive DR tests using Site Recovery Managers “Test” feature that requires zero downtime.