Backup and Disaster Recovery Consolidated

Backup and disaster recovery consolidated as one service is not a new idea, but is again becoming a preferred practice with recently available technology.

There was a time when businesses and their CIOs looked at backup and disaster recovery as one and the same.  Have we seen this thinking re-emerge?  During our discussions with clients from differing industries, some used to think that backup by itself formed the disaster recovery strategy of the company.  Fortunately many CIO’s have been able to educate businesses about the various scenarios and the implications of not having strategies in place such as, standby infrastructure at an offsite location or a tested disaster recovery solution.

With the evolution and acceptance of cloud computing and online data backup systems, more businesses are able to adopt a mature backup and IT disaster recovery strategy as part of their overall business continuity plan.  Supported by the investment of tier 1 software vendors, the industry has been able to confidently combine the functions of backup and IT disaster recovery through the introduction of extended retention.

Continuous data protection (CDP) has not only reduced RPOs (recovery point objectives) to almost zero but has also allowed CIOs and CFOs to realise increased savings through consolidation.  CDP technology can be used as part of a managed backup and disaster recovery solution with the added benefit of extended retention.  If configured optionally, IT teams can have the high-availability luxury of local rollback snapshots points while having 7+ years of backup retention at the remote disaster recovery and backup site.

Offsite backup and disaster recovery treated as a single service; a consolidated approach to IT business continuity.

False sense of security pervades DR approaches

Australian businesses are aware of the importance of disaster recovery planning, but their reliance on manual approaches means that organisations risk falling short of target recovery times if an incident occurs, according to research released today.

A US study conducted by IDG Research Services, a sister company of IDG Communications, the publisher of Techworld Australia, revealed that although most companies surveyed had DR plans in place, many relied on manual recovery processes that ran the risk of missing recovery targets. Two-thirds of participants relied on manual recovery. In addition, testing of DR programs was a low priority, with a significant portion of organisations never conducting any ongoing DR testing at all. The results of an Australian DR survey conducted among IT professionals, 58 per cent of whom worked for companies with more than 500 seats, by storage services vendor FalconStor mirrored the US results.

Seventy nine per cent of respondents said they had DR/business continuity plan in place but the majority relied on manual or semi-automated DR solutions and testing was done annually or not at all. However, 60 per cent indicated recovery periods of longer than four hours would impact on productivity, reputation or revenue.
Kevin McIsaac, advisor at consultancy firm IBRS, said that there was a false sense of security among Australian businesses when it came to DR.

“The business has this unrealistic expectation that all their systems will be back in four hours,” he said. “They have no idea.”

Although most IT organisations realised the importance of DR planning, pressure from the business meant that revising and testing DR plans often falls by the wayside.

“I believe there’s of a lot of people in IT who are not sure about their IT plans or their ability to recover, but they don’t really kind of stick their head into it either — they don’t want to open Pandora’s Box,” McIsaac said.

“If I sat down with a reasonably senior person in your IT organisation and said, ‘Is this important?’ they would say yes. If I said, ‘Are you comfortable about your DR plans?’ they would generally squirm in their seat and go, ‘Mmm, not so much.’

“If I’m dealing with a more technical level guy, or a more junior guy, they just go ‘whatever’. For them, it’s just another piece of work. They’re overworked, they’re stressed, they’ve got way to many day-to-day operational problems and they’re putting out way too many day-to-day fires to really worry about what they consider to be an insurance plan for something they pray never happens. And if it does happen they’re no longer working there.”

McIsaac said there was an awareness of the problem, but “you think about the number of people who don’t insure their houses, think ah yeah we need to insure the house, then don’t do it”.

“It really falls in that same category,” he said. “Most IT organisations and people in general are often heavily driven by the urgent rather than the important, and it’s a classic planning and strategy problem.”

Data Centres: To Build or Not to Build?

There are a number of triggers such as business growth and office relocation which may cause an organisation to evaluate the adequacy of their current data centre. The decision of whether to outsource a data centre as opposed maintaining one in-house can depend on a number of factors. For businesses with only one location a secondary data centre for remote backup, offsite backup storage or disaster recovery purposes will need to be considered.

The way a business operates should be considered, as an outsourced data centre will work well for organisations where operational expenditure is preferred. If you’re already using cloud storage, online data backup, email archiving or outsourced disaster recovery services this strategy will be complimentary. Building/Upgrading and maintaining a data centre will require significant up front capital expenditure to achieve the same result as a commercial data centre provider. As commercial data centres deal in thousands of square meters of technical floor space there are a lot of savings to be made with that quantity of scale.

An outsourced facility generally will give better resiliency as most commercial providers have at least N+1 redundancy on power and cooling systems coupled with better physical security. The importance of the level of resilience needed for primary infrastructure will depend on the maturity of your organisation’s data backup, IT disaster recovery and business continuity processes.

Aspects such as expand-ability of technical floor space, floor loading, fire suppression and the availability and redundancy of power and cooling infrastructure all need to be considered carefully when assessing the suitability of a solution.

Shrinking Legacy IT Business sees HDS Grow in the Cloud

Historically known as an enterprise storage-focused vendor, Hitachi Data System continues to work its way into the cloud market, which it sees as a “growth opportunity” and complementary to its long-time storage business.

Speaking with ZDNet, Adrian De Luca, Hitachi Data Systems Asia-Pacific chief technology officer, said that given the changing needs of its legacy customers, it was important for the business to take the leap and traverse into the world of cloud, too.

“There’s no secret that legacy IT is shrinking,” he said.

“Certainly the selling of our legacy components such as standalone storage has been a depressed business, but we’re still growing. The reason why we’re still growing is because of private and hybrid cloud.”

In fact, De Luca said HDS is finding its strength is in the private cloud space where the company has seen that side of the business double year-on-year. He said there’s a clear market for private cloud in Australia as many of the company’s existing enterprise customers are after the consumption and automation model, as well as the self-service model of cloud, but still want to retain their existing SLAs.

“Our enterprise customers have a lot of legacy systems; they’ve got legacy skills and fixed investments such as datacentres, so for them it seems like a quantum leap to move the cloud. So they need to typically take smaller and more incremental steps into cloud,” he said.

“What we’ve done is tried to build a journey for a lot of those customers. It’s something we call ‘your cloud, your way’.”

Unlike other traditional vendors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard — which are also transitioning their business into the cloud market — HDS’s approach to cloud has been through setting up cloud partnerships. In the last two months, the company has signed partnerships with Brisbane-based SureBridge IT, Victoria-based Global Storage, and Avnet to help resell its cloud services onshore across the country. HDS’s offerings are also integrated to work with key software vendors including VMware and SAP.

“HDS is a partner-centric company. Unlike IBM and HP, they want to build the datacentre and run them. We know what we’re really good at but we also recognise the things that we need to partner with,” De Luca said.

While HDS is strategically playing to its strengths in the private cloud market, the vendor hasn’t completely neglected the public cloud space either. While De Luca acknowledged the company is going up against some of the biggest players including Amazon and Google that have “certainly validated a new business model”, HDS is prepared to be part of it.

In June, the company announced a number of mobility products so it could integrate public cloud offerings and extend its technology portfolio.

“What we talked about is how we can take, for example, our archive platform and actually connect a public cloud behind it. Our file serving can also leverage public cloud. This is all a big maturity change or step change of HDS in Australia. We’ve not only recognised cloud, but we’re also becoming successful in it,” said De Luca.

The plan of attack for HDS will be to target the smaller end of town, the SME market, an area that the company hasn’t traditionally been involved in before, but according to De Luca is responding better to moving to the cloud.

“I think what is happening here is that we have a clever SME community who are saying that they’re not going to bother hosting their own cloud, or buy their own components, but are going straight to a cloud service provider for all of that,” he said.

“But what they’re saying is they want to go to a local cloud service provider because they want that customer service onshore. So we’ve created a cloud service provider unit that is focused on our multinational service providers.”

The only challenge now for the company is to convince the rest of the market that HDS is serious about being a key cloud vendor.

“Quite frankly our challenge is being recognised in the market for providing these services,” De Luca said.

“We’re not a strong marketing company but we power a lot of the technology behind these local providers, so we’re happy to be the silent partner in this.”

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