Companies of all sizes realize that near real-time business recovery is no longer a nice-to-have – it is becoming a new corporate must have. Competition, regulations and the 24x7 nature of businesses all push for continual application and data availability under almost any circumstances.
The Move to Push Button
Business Recovery
The New Corporate Requirement for
Enterprise Business Continuity
OOccttoobbeerr 2007
By
Jerome M WendtLead Analyst and PresidentDCIG Inc
2007 Datacenter Infrastructure Group Inc. All rights ReservedDCIG Inc 7511 Madison Street Ralston NE 68127-4353The Move to Push Button Business Recovery
The New Corporate Requirement for Enterprise Business Continuity
Index
i. The New Corporate Must Have ii. Closing the Data Protection Gap iii. Evaluating CDP Architectures iv. Host-Based Architectural Challenges v. SAN-Based Architectural Challenges vi. Host-Of? oad CDP vii. The Impact of Host-Of? oad CDP viii. Evolutionary, not Revolutionary ix. The Move to Push Button Continuity
2007 Datacenter Infrastructure Group Inc. All rights ReservedDCIG Inc 7511 Madison Street Ralston NE 68127-4353The Move to Push Button Business Recovery
The New Corporate Requirement for Enterprise Business Continuity
The New Corporate Must Have
Companies of all sizes realize that near real-time business recovery is no longer a nice-to-have - it is becoming a new corporate must have. Competition, regulations and the 24x7 nature of businesses all push for continual application and data availability under almost any circumstances.
Continuing server and storage growth coupled with new technologies and evolving application recovery requirements add to the complexity. Over time the criticality of speci? c corporate applications and databases evolve. This evolution makes it nearly impossible for businesses to have any degree of certainty that they can recover these applications using existing data protection techniques, much less recover data as fast as applicationservice level agreements (SLAs) may dictate. This situation leaves businesses to hope that plans they have developed in the past will work in the future should an actual recovery need to occur.
This lack of clarity about corporate application availability leaves the failure of a speci? c application and its true impact upon the company as an unknown. The failure of any application or database can cause an unforeseenripple effect throughout the business which companies obviously want to avoid. But trying to continually monitorevery application's impact to the business and constantly adjust its assigned level of data protection is both foolhardy and impractical.
Many companies still standardize on traditional data protection methods such as backup software to address these unknowns but this tactic offers little hope when considered from a macro data protection view. Data recoveries may need to occur onsite or offsite; in stages with various recovery points in the events of brown outs; or with different personnel than the individuals who daily manage the backups or initially drafted the data protection plan. These variables introduce escalating levels of risk to the company as it creates dependencies on speci? c processes and people that most companies will ? nd unacceptable.
However companies must do something. So companies implement various data protection schemes for their different application tiers. Users may protect mission critical applications with synchronous or asynchronous replication software to provide real-time or near real-time application data protection. Entry and mid-level applications are relegated to the use of backup software that can take hours or even days to backup data and equally long to recovery.
These processes are complicated to set up and even more dif? cult to manage plus it provides companies no assurance it can recover its data, much less deliver business continuity. This leaves companies desirous of an approach that closes the current gap in its business continuity needs without the cost or complexity that the current extremes in data protection introduce.
2007 Datacenter Infrastructure Group Inc. All rights ReservedDCIG Inc 7511 Madison Street Ralston NE 68127-4353Closing the Data Protection Gap
Between these two extremes a new approach to data protection exists that closes this data protection gap: asynchronous replication based on continuous data protection (CDP) technology. CDP provides the following advantages over current data protection approaches for all tiers of applications and servers:
Ø Common method for enterprise-wide data protection Ø ... [download for more]
