New technology drives down the cost of Disaster Recovery Planning
 When a business critical server fails, the most urgent task is to quickly re-establish user access to data and the most recent transactions. No data loss can be tolerated. Until recently the only solutions for the most demanding environments in terms of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) required budgets and resource commitments only available in the largest datacenters. Now, however, solutions are available to switch data and applications to a backup server quickly and easily, and if necessary fully automatically.
The basic principals are simple: as files are modified, they are continuously copied to a target platform (server, appliance, or virtual server instance). Continuous data backup is a frequently used in data replication and automatic failover configurations, supporting aggressive business objectives and regulatory requirements. Vendors such as Acronis, Double-Take Software, Quest/Vizioncore and Novell/Platespin all allow for the configuration of local or remote mirroring. Double-Take Software supports Windows, Linux, and VMware environments, with asynchronous replication ensuring data modifications are captured in real time, byte by byte.
Failover switching to a virtual server
Continuous server-to-server data replication delivers more effective protection than tape backups, and costs less than redundant SAN racks (see box opposite). Double-Take offers almost instantaneous failover of file servers, applications and transactional data. The full production environment is protected, accelerating system re-start and reducing the impact on end-user productivity. The procedures developed by Double-Take Software are compatible with both server and storage virtualisation. A skilled system administrator with a well-configured virtual server environment can ensure that essential business applications are on line within a few minutes of a failure. Double-Take Software protects the enterprise's key information assets: file servers, database systems, document storage and email.
More flexible, more cost-effective Disaster Recovery Planning
In conjunction with virtualisation solutions such as Microsoft's, Vmware, or Xen, Double-Take continuous backup and replication software offers a new approach to disaster recovery, more flexible and less resource intensive. It's no longer necessary for backup servers and production servers to have identical physical configurations. Following an incident, a single backup server can adapt on the fly, depending on requirements. If necessary it can execute multiple virtual machines, each one backing up a critical application, with no performance impact. Business critical applications are typically run on dedicated servers or server clusters, with load-balancing over multiple physical machines. Double-Take Software's byte-level replication ensures real-time backup of the complete production environment. With Double-Take, a range of failover configurations are possible: server to server, cluster to cluster, or even physical to virtual server.
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Loss-free data restoration
When critical data is consolidated in the datacenter, remote backups ensure protection against key risks such as configuration errors, network problems or electrical failures. But a business continuity plan depending on external systems which require a day or more to restore data is insufficient for today's enterprise. Where the loss of even a single byte of data is an issue, RAID systems are being replaced by redundant SAN deployments. With synchronous or asynchronous replication independent of rack configurations, SAN redundancy can deliver fast failover for data storage. However, even with a storage configuration like this, fast system failover will only succeed if the servers and their I/O systems are still operational; if not, the time needed to bring the backup system on line will depend on how long it takes to reconfigure the servers and the network. Compared with the cost and overheads of a redundant SAN configuration – the preferred choice of storage vendors – server-to-server (or cluster-to-cluster) replication responds more effectively to the most frequently occurring server and I/O breakdowns. Double-Take asynchronous replication writes changed data, byte by byte, to disk storage on the backup system even before it's been written to the production system's disks. When disaster strikes, the unprecedented flexibility of Double-Take Software guarantees business continuity. And when Double-Take's mirroring is deployed in conjunction with the snapshot feature on Windows Server 2008, the result is a backup server which comes on line with transactional data no more than a few minutes old, where a tape backup would at best restore the previous day's data, if not last week's! |
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