Rackware Inc

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What is DRaaS and why is it useful?

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS, also known as Disaster Recovery as a service, is the replication of hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a man made or natural catastrophe. DRaaS can be especially useful to organizations that lack the necessary expertise to provision, configure, and test an effective disaster recovery plan (DRP).

Why is DRaaS useful?

Millions of businesses around the world encounter some form of natural disaster. Imagine if a power outage, hardware failure, file corruption, human error, earthquake, flood, hurricane, thunderstorm, wildfire, winter weather, or tornado, strikes your data center. Major interruptions like your website going down or losing all your customer data will likely occur.

In Ponemon Institute’s “Cost of Data Center Outages” study, it was reported that unplanned downtime costs organizations an average cost of $8,850 per minute.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that 43% of organizations affected by a natural disaster never reopen, and 29% of organizations affected close within two years of the occurrence.

DRaaS focuses on a short recovery point objective. This means that the data restored will be as close to its current “now” state as possible. Typical recovery time objectives are within 4 hours and will bring up machines geographically located in a different location. For example, if your datacenter in Florida gets affected by a hurricane, DRaaS ensures your data will not be lost by switching to live mirrored servers in Nevada, which was not affected by the hurricane.

What should you consider when choosing a DRaaS?

1.Get a performance service level agreement (SLA) - Create a contract between you and your service provider to ensure pre-defined performance (i.e. 1 hour SLA guaranteeing your critical applications will be up and running within an hour).

2. DRaaS costs are highly variable - Watch out for hidden fees (i.e. retrieval fees that charge per gigabyte which can substantially add up).

3.Couple DRaaS with data protection - The cloud is an ideal place for long-term data retention because it’s isolated from production data and remote from ransomware.

4.Pay for only what you use - Choose a provider that offers different DRaaS services for different classes of applications.

5.Cloud seeding options - With cloud seeding, you can use physical media (i.e. tape, server, hard disks, etc.) to pre-load your data to the cloud and restore a failed local database.

6.DRaaS can protect cloud applications - Deploy a backup appliance within the cloud and point your cloud applications to backup software in a different cloud facility than where your cloud applications are running.

7.Include automated test recovery - You should have automated testing at least once a month and after any changes to the infrastructure to ensure your applications will really recovery.

8.Advantages of purpose-built clouds - Purpose-built clouds have seamless integration between your backup appliances and the cloud, holistic support, and predictable recovery times.

How can RackWare help?

RackWare develops cloud management software that allows enterprises to migrate applications, provide disaster recovery and backup, and hybrid cloud management.

The RackWare Management Module(RMM) provides enterprises IT resilience by automating disaster recovery and backup to any cloud. Some of our features include:

Why Rackware?

Improved Resiliency with Better RPO/RTO

1.Significantly improved support over traditional tape backup at a fraction of the cost required to maintain a replicated data center.

2.Multiple recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) options that gives you control over availability and costs. You can ensure that critical applications recover quickly while secondary applications do so in the most cost-effective time frame.

3.Pre-provisioned resources are launched in minutes to ensure a rapid RTO while auto recovery fallback ensures applications return to the primary data center for maximum performance.

Flexibility Between Data Center and Cloud, Physical & Virtual Environments

1.Delivers a truly heterogeneous approach, reducing multiple tools and helping users avoid lock-in of server vendor, hypervisor or cloud provider.

2.Enables users to dynamically scale physical, virtual and cloud resources across private and public environments as computing needs fluctuate, allowing enterprises to get the highest performance and availability out of their cloud.

3.Intelligently leverages cloud solutions for today’s applications.

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Cloud Management Solutions

When evaluating cloud management solutions, you should consider the following eight factors identified by Gartner.

RackWare’s AIM Backup & Disaster Recovery (DR) solution changes the way we think and execute backup. The RackWare model looks at backup and DR as complementary functions. RackWare captures the data and records it as an entire Image that is pre-prepared to be restored completely or allow for rapid retrieval of individual files and directories.

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Disaster Recovery – 3 Things You Need To Do

Everyone likes to talk about the 5 or 10 pitfalls or and challenges when doing your Disaster Recovery Planning, as an example here from Jeff Byrne of the Teneja Group,http://searchsmbstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Common-pitfalls-in-disaster-recovery-procedures.  I say there are simply 3: Planning, Don’t just do the easy stuff, and Don’t set and forget.

Planning

It is critical to architect your Disaster Recovery solution with a focus on each applications importance to your business.  Don’t assume classic assignments of Tier 1 and 2 applications.  Discuss with the business owners how they use each application and its importance to delivering revenue and critical services.

Understand the impact of lost data for each application.  More importantly each file associated with an application.  This might seem like a daunting task, but it will save your business and reduce the cost of your DR implementations.  Managing your DR at the application file level can save you time and money from unneeded synchronization cycles while only targeting critical files that impact the viability of the application and its performance.  This reduces burden on the WAN and in a cloud DR implementation save considerably on storage while ensuring a high Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is met.

Understand what the tolerance is of the application full availability after a DR event.  How quickly do you need an application up and running?  Maybe 10% of your businesses application need sub 5-minute Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).  The rest of the applications have tolerances even as great as up to 24 hours.  Balancing cost and availability allows you to selectively determine the staging and provisioning of the application’s DR instance.  An application that can tolerate an RTO greater than an hour can live in stasis saving compute resources and only those hyper critical applications need to be consuming compute and networking overhead on-going.

What is your overall IT architecture?  In a hybrid environment you will have physical and virtual serves across data centers, public, and private clouds.  After a DR event where do you want each of your applications primary instance to exist?   Is it remaining in the cloud, or does it need to rehydrate back to a physical instance and location?  Understanding these questions lets you make decision on how you provision each application’s DR instance.  This is important to ensure performance expectations are being met and helps in balancing data center and cloud resources costs. Don’t do the easy stuff first

I talk with so many customers that tell me they have 80% of their applications in a Disaster Recovery plan.  When I ask what about the other 20% they tell me: “It was the hard stuff”, “the applications are on physical servers”, or “It is a legacy application”.  Further inquiry about the critical nature of those absent applications customers tell me that those are the crown jewels and they are relying on simple backup copies, worse yet it is on tape!  This is insane, there is no application that can’t be included in a Disaster Recovery Plan, and it doesn’t have to be as hard as you think.   There are Cloud Management Platform solutions that include Disaster Recovery as a feature.  These CMP solutions accommodate all applications, physical and virtualized, in data centers and clouds.  Protect your crown jewels not just the easy stuff. These CMP solutions also save your IT department time and resources.  They eliminate multiple point products and their support costs. They simplify the environment and reducing resource needs.  These CMP solutions also provide cloud resource management, improving cloud governance and cost management.  Some even provide the ability to have cloud resources self-provisioned by application owners while ensuring application templates and distribution adhere to IT and business standards.  

Don’t Set and forget

Another frightening trend with IT departments is the set and forget habit.  Since we don’t (hopefully) have DR events happen all the time testing the system doesn’t have a high priority.  The disruptive nature of some DR implementations requires down time, and upgrades and maintenance take precedence.  Just like eliminating 20% of applications from the DR plan, not testing on a quarterly basis is ludicrous.  Take a lesson from anyone who attempted to do a restore of a critical application from a tape backup and had it fail.  There are solutions that are non-invasive and non-disruptive, there is no excuse to Test, Test, Test, and Test.

In Conclusion

Plan, build a Run Book so the process for each application is documented and not a one size fits all approach.  Don’t leave any application behind, this is your companies life blood and there is no excuse for not having every application protected.  Inspect what you expect, watching the clock tick away with fingers crossed waiting for your DR instance to come alive is not the time to test the system, but it probably will be the time to update your resume. 

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Disaster Recovery

Do you want to hire enterprise for protecting your workloads, through backup, and disaster recovery? If so, welcome to RackWare. We help you in getting the highest performance and availability out of your cloud system. Call us now!