Entries categorized under “Business Continuity”

I have been looking into clustering and high availability (HA) a lot lately, mostly as it pertains to my day job but also because I just like to keep myself up to speed on things. What has been changing? An abundance of things! (read more)

Bringing storage systems initially designed to meet Big Data demands into enterprise data centers is proving to be a bigger challenge than either storage providers or enterprises anticipated. While enterprises certainly want a storage system with a cost-effective, easy-to-manage, scalable architecture, other features such as data protection, data security and virtualization integration also come into play. EMC Isilon's latest OneFS 7.0 operating system takes these specific needs into account freeing enterprises to tackle their Big Data concerns. (read more)

Business continuity and disaster recovery have been "top" priorities for many enterprises going back at least a decade. However it is difficult to keep these strategic objectives at the "top" of the priority list when they encounter operational headwinds brought on by age-old tactical backup concerns such as increasing backup capacities and performance. Tackling these complementary but often conflicting priorities requires the implementation of a solution that delivers on both of these objectives. (read more)

KISS - "Keep IT Simple, Stupid" - is the objective of almost every small and midsized business (SMB) on the planet. However SMBs and storage providers sometimes define "simple" in very different ways, especially when it comes to performing tasks like data protection and business continuity. Taking this challenge head-on, VMware has tightly integrated EMC Avamar technology in its new vSphere Data Protection offering to provide SMBs with the level of simplicity that they expect and need. (read more)

Many SMBs are interested in moving beyond virtualization's upfront consolidation and cost reduction benefits to also achieving improved availability, data protection and business continuity for their applications. But to date the costs and technical complexities of pursuing those goals have held many of them back. VMware's recent vSphere 5.1 Data Protection release changes that as VMware leverages EMC's deep backup and recovery expertise to address these specific SMB needs. (read more)

Just about a month ago Symantec released the global findings of its 2012 Disaster Preparedness Survey which, as expected, generated a good amount of attention in terms of its results. But what always piques my interest in these reports is the nuggets of information that I find when I dig deeper into them. This report did not disappoint as it provided some key insights into other key trends going on within data protection. In particular, it revealed how most companies are now using one team to manage the protection and recovery of their data. (read more)

A convergence is happening in the cloud service provider space. More cloud-based archive and backup providers are evolving to account for transactional/production data while managed service providers want to extend their reach into the archival/backup space. One company at the forefront of this convergence is cloud service provider American Internet Services (AIS). Today I talk with AIS's VP of Network Engineering, Steve Wallace, about how this convergence is impacting cloud service providers in general and AIS specifically. (read more)

Ever since continuous data protection (CDP) was introduced nearly a decade ago, it has largely been a technology looking for a problem to solve. However in the last few years it is finding a home in the most unlikely of places - social media websites. But maybe what is most interesting is that little known R1Soft CDP has emerged as the early and widely recognized leader in this space. (read more)

If there is anything that businesses deplore is a lack of choice and, right now, a perception exists that VMware vSphere is their only hypervisor choice due to some features that vSphere offers that Microsoft Hyper-V does not. However this gap in hypervisor feature functionality closed further with this week's release from Symantec Corporation of Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows. (read more)

"Yeah, we do that." That's the response many software providers of storage virtualization give when asked if they can offer a specific storage function. But that "Can do" attitude reveals the heart of the problem of these providers: they end up acquiring a "jack of all trades, master of none" reputation. Today FalconStor Software still answers, "Yeah, we do that," but now provides a more well articulated service-oriented data protection story to complement its storage solutions. (read more)

A couple of weeks ago I was getting a briefing on Atempo Live Navigator regarding its deduplication and near-CDP features that are specifically targeted for desktops, laptops and file servers. But since that conversation, it struck me that CDP and near-CDP technologies have been around for years which got me to thinking. Why is it that traditional approaches to backup persist even as arguably better approaches to data protection such as CDP and near-CDP struggle to get traction? (read more)

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) does many things well when it comes to automating the recovery process for virtualized environments that simultaneously eliminates the complexity of creating and testing recovery plans. But what SRM does not do is provide control of and visibility into the applications within VMs at the recovery site. That changes today as organizations now have a new option to enhance their SRM deployment with the latest release of Symantec ApplicationHA. (read more)

Those who have their feet on the ground are always closest to where the action is and few are closer to end-users in regards to their desktop and server virtualization initiatives than VMware resellers. These individuals recently gathered in Orlando, FL, for VMware's annual Partner Exchange in part for training but also to swap stories as to where their customers are in their respective journeys toward virtualizing their environments. What they heard and shared is that customers no longer debate whether or not to deploy virtualization. Rather their customers are trying to figure out just how far down the road they can go. (read more)

Ask any organization if they want a disaster recovery (DR) solution and the answer is almost always a "Yes." But then rephrase the question and ask, "Are they willing to invest a lot of time and money to test, implement and continually verify that a DR solution works as intended?" Put that way, it is not unusual for that organization to hem and haw before finally responding with a "No." (read more)

Moving from "D2D2T" to "D2D2D" is sometimes seen as an unattainable hurdle that enterprise organizations cannot overcome when tape is used for secondary roles such as archiving or disaster recovery (DR). But replacing the "T" in "D2D2T" with a "D" is now practical, possible and affordable. Doing so simply means enterprises need to demonstrate that disk offers the same or more functionality than tape when used in these capacities while costing the same or less. (read more)

The confidence that mid-sized companies exhibit in their ability to successfully recover from disasters is remarkable in light of the lack of evidence that there is to support it. Recent surveys have uncovered that this confidence is often misplaced and may even be setting them up for some nasty surprises down the road. (read more)

Configuring high availability for virtual machines (VMs) in VMware environments presents new challenges that are not always easy to spot when applications are virtualized. One prime example is handling the failover of applications on VMs that are part of a cluster without causing a network split brain. It is this exact issue that Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Storage Foundation HA 5.1 addresses with its new non-SCSI-3 fencing feature. (read more)

Arbitrating a network split in stretch cluster configurations, such as campus clusters, is a continuing challenge in managing fail over configurations. One specific challenge is optimizing the management of a recovery of a cluster when a network split occurs. It is this flexibility to favor a specific site that is part of a campus cluster such that it emerges the winner is what the new preferred fencing feature in Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation HA 5.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) provides. (read more)

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are rapidly moving towards virtualizing their physical servers using VMware. But as they do so, they are also looking to minimize the cost, complexity and overhead that the backup of VMware servers introduces while increasing their ability to recover their newly virtualized applications. It is these concerns that InMage's new vContinuum software addresses by using a new technique to tap into VMware that provides near zero impact backups with near real time recoveries. (read more)

Downtime is rarely an option for mission critical applications and while many strides have been made over the last decade to ensure uninterrupted application availability, some gaps in providing protection still remain. One of these is reducing the time it takes to detect when a failure has occurred so a recovery on a secondary server can be promptly initiated and successfully completed. It is expediting these server recoveries that the new Intelligent Monitoring Framework introduced in Storage Foundation HA 5.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) accomplishes. (read more)

If past VMworld conferences are any indication, more than 10,000 individuals will head to San Francisco the last week of this month looking for the latest advancements and news regarding VMware at VMworld 2010. But with so many organizations confronted with new backup challenges that are part and parcel of any VMware implementation, as well as looking to take advantage of the new recovery options that it creates, do not be surprised if data protection steals some of the spotlight at this year's event. (read more)

A little over two years ago companies were advised to "start small" with virtualization but "think big" and, based upon what we are seeing today, it's clear that organizations followed that advice considering the wide scale adoption of virtualization that has occurred. But as they enter the "Think big" phase many are encountering a roadblock: business critical applications that they are hesitant to virtualize because of availability concerns on virtualized platforms. Enter this week's newly announced ApplicationHA from Symantec that looks to extend server virtualization all the way to even these business critical apps. (read more)

Software fixes, patches and upgrades on production systems are a persistent, nagging challenge in today's production environments. Vendors frequently promise that by simply installing the latest revision of their code, many current issues that an application is experiencing will be resolved. The risk that organizations run is that if the latest set of code does not work as promised, it can actually make the situation worse. (read more)

A few months ago I wrote a blog entry that took a look at how enhancements in the NFS v4 standard have opened the door for NAS file service appliances to be used with more highly available (HA) transaction-oriented applications such as the TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). But before organizations adopt a NAS solution that uses NFS v4 for real-time failover, they should be aware of features offered by the Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) solution that NAS with NFS v4 alone does not yet provide. (read more)

The tolerance for downtime in enterprises is nearly gone. Business requirements have changed, service levels are more stringent and every second of an outage could translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue. Classic high-availability (HA) solutions no longer cut it as enterprise applications require fast failovers, often with sub-minute recovery times. (read more)