Entries categorized under “Business Continuity”

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)

One of the principle struggles within organizations in the first decade of the new millennium has been solving Windows backup issues. Now that a new decade has arrived the problem has changed as organizations turn their attention to how they can recover their Windows application servers in a time frame and manner that meets their requirements. But to identify such a solution they first need to define what such a recovery solution should look like. (read more)

This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent's annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble. (read more)

The introduction of disk and deduplication into the backup process over the last few years has certainly helped to minimize existing backup problems. Organizations using these technologies have found that their backup success rates now approach 100% and that they no longer have to continually troubleshoot backup problems. But while these technologies may fix existing backup problems, they relegate disk to a glorified form of tape and do not serve to fundamentally transform the recovery process. (read more)

Numerous surveys show that the adoption of server virtualization is poised to take off in small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). But what can get overlooked in this trend is that greater than 70% of these virtual server deployments that occur in SMB environments will use external storage. This is where SMBs can run into problems. Identifying an affordable, scalable external storage system that can meet their short and long term needs is sometimes easier said than done but that is exactly what the newly announced SnapServer SAN S2000 is designed to deliver. (read more)

Even though Gartner Research says that server virtualization is not yet widely implemented (only 16 percent of workloads currently run on virtual machines according to Gartner), Gartner does point to a more virtualized environment in the very near future. It expects that fully 50% of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012 and represent nearly 58 million deployed machines. But as this transition from physical to virtual occurs within data centers, traditional disaster recovery (DR) software, procedures and techniques are not positioned to migrate so cleanly into this newly virtualized environment. (read more)

The new relationship that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) struck with InMage Systems to use InMage about three months ago had a number of immediate ramifications. It provided HDS with a new heterogeneous replication option that it could use across its own storage systems; it made HDS more competitive in customer accounts where it did not traditionally have a foothold and it provided an entrée for HDS into next generation data protection technologies for disaster recovery. (read more)

"Business Continuity" and "Disaster Recovery" are two aspects of IT and business planning and process management that no organization can afford to get wrong. So it is somewhat disconcerting that a recent article reports that the majority of businesses do not yet have a disaster recovery plan or business continuity process in place or, if they do, they do not regularly test it. (read more)