New tools make disaster recovery easier
 In the past, disaster recovery projects frequently failed because of the complexities of change management, patching, and system maintenance. To be successful, disaster recovery planning has to be kept simple. A first essential step is to consolidate servers, effectively containing the overall scope of the project. Server consolidation reduces the number of elements to be managed, simplifying the definition of recovery class, RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective). With today's technologies, recovery downtime can be reduced from a day to just two hours. A wide range of products allows the enterprise to deploy a tailored, cost-effective solution for the virtualised datacenter. Let's take a look at some of the leading solutions on the market:
VMware®
SRM (Site Recovery Manager) is a disaster recovery management and automation solution that eliminates complex manual recovery steps and features non-disruptive testing of recovery plans. Replacing shelves of paper-based procedures, allowing more frequent and non-disruptive recovery testing, SRM opens new perspectives for enterprise disaster recovery planning. SRM, however, is only supported in virtual environments, and is a relatively expensive solution.
Double-Take®
Double-Take supports multi-site disaster recovery plans with remote data backup. It uses VMware snapshots taken at regular intervals, replicating the virtual servers to the secondary site. Double-Take can also replicate physical systems. The GeoCluster option allows data to be replicated between clusters in virtual or physical server deployments. Powerful new features include comprehensive support of Windows® 2008 Server clustering with Hyper-V™.
PlateSpin®
PlateSpin, acquired earlier this year by Novell™, offers Forge, a dedicated disaster recovery appliance comprising a hypervisor (ESX), a Dell™ Intel® quad-core server and PlateSpin's key software product PowerConvert. 2.5TB of direct-attached SATA disk storage in a RAID-5 configuration completes the fully pre-configured package. According to PlateSpin, the appliance installs transparently on the infrastructure and protects both physical and virtual servers.
VizionCore™
VizionCore solutions provide image-level hot backups of either the entire virtual ma-chine or just the differential, simply and easily while the virtual machine is still running. Backup images can be stored locally, on a SAN, or transferred as compressed files to a remote site as part of disaster recovery or business continuity planning. Restoration is fast. Vizioncore's software does not require agents and runs in block mode
InMage
Block-level real-time high-granularity application-focused continuous data protection is InMage's differentiator. The InMage solution supports SAN or NAS storage platforms and works with any hypervisor.
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Disaster Recovery in a Box: The Way Forward
Modular Datacenterfrom Sun™ is the new name for its black box offering, with a new version (the D20) announced a few weeks ago. Rackable Systems® offers the ICE Cube™, a container-full of blade servers. HP has joined the fray with it's Performance Optimized Data Center, or POD, while Microsoft® runs Virtual Earth™ on servers installed in shipping containers. Why the rush to containers? To reduce the cost of relocating the datacenter; no need to get under the raised flooring or fight with miles of cabling - the containers can be loaded onto trucks and delivered directly where they're needed in case of on-site incidents or to quickly add capacity. And, the container-based datacenter is environmentally sound. According to vendors, it consumes up to 40% less power than an equivalent configuration in a classic datacenter. |
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