Entries categorized under “Disaster Recovery”

PHD Virtual's recent acquisition of the ReliableDR product is a win for businesses stuck in a manual approach to disaster recovery (DR). PHD Virtual Backup already provides VMware environments with reliable backup, replication and recovery tools. ReliableDR adds service recovery testing against RPOs/RTOs and disaster recovery orchestration to enable businesses achieve what PHD Virtual calls "DR assurance". (read more)

Virtualizing applications such that it results in the use of fewer servers makes great sense. Applications are centralized. Hardware is more efficiently used. Data center floor space is freed up. Virtual machine (VM) loads may be more efficiently and non-disruptively redistributed between physical systems. But then the realization hits. You have put all of your proverbial eggs in one basket and unless you have a real or near real-time copy of this data off-site, should a major disaster hit, your goose is cooked. The question then becomes, "What is the best way to get this data off-site?" (read more)

Virtual backup appliances (VBAs) are the new hot ticket in backup. Providing an economical alternative to physical backup appliances, they are finding a new home as the preferred solution to backup branch, remote and small offices as well as serving as a replication target. But to fulfill these different roles results in the need for VBAs to take on their own personalities. The new Virtual Backup Software in Eversync 5.1 gives organizations access to a solution they have long sought: simplified backup and replication. (read more)

Everyone in the US and maybe in the world seems to know about the impact that Hurricane Sandy had on the Northeastern part of the United States. The scope of the devastation resulting from Hurricane Sandy is absolutely devastating with the aftermath of recovering from it almost more difficult than weathering the storm itself. If anything, Hurricane Sandy highlights just how difficult it is to plan for a disaster and the many different and unexpected ways companies need to be prepared to respond to a disaster. (read more)

To say "All virtual machine (VM) backup software is the same" is like saying "All birds can fly." While VM backup software solutions can and certainly do protect VMs, the techniques they use, what hypervisors they support and how they manage backup and recovery vary greatly between them. Understanding and quantifying these differences becomes especially important for those organizations looking to select the best solution to protect the growing number of VMs in their environment. (read more)

Delivering high availability (HA) to applications classified as "business critical" in recent years has been as much a technical obstacle as a financial one that organizations have struggled to overcome. The latest version of Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server addresses these concerns. Now any application running on either a physical or virtual machine may recover almost immediately to a virtual machine (VM) giving enterprises the high availability (HA) they have sought without the hardware costs or VM reboot wait times. (read more)

Most organizations already have more than enough on their plates in terms of simply trying to meet the day-to-day demands of their business. So the last thing many have time to deal with is the complex mix of both pre-existing and emerging regulations that govern how they access, maintain, retain and secure their records. Yet respond to these demands they must. Doing so begins by following four tips so they may address these concerns in an economical, efficient and effective fashion. (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)

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)

Crawl. Walk. Run. That progression pretty well summarizes how most people look to take advantage of cloud service providers over time though, in cloud services terminology, the progression may be better summed up as: Archive, Replicate, Recover. Today I conclude my conversation with American Internet Service's VP of Network Engineering, Steve Wallace, as we examine how many of AIS' clients initially get their data into the AIS cloud and then expand their use of AIS cloud services over time. (read more)

A decade ago, the thought of running business applications on any form of Linux was a concept that few enterprises took seriously. Fast forward to today and not only do we see applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we see organizations actively seeking to move more of their business-critical applications from other platforms such as UNIX to RHEL. It is to help accelerate that process that Symantec and Red Hat today announced a number of jointly supported solutions make that transition as seamless as possible and then properly support it once it is in place (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)

It is what almost every Windows IT admin envisions someday implementing in his or her environment: "The ability to recover any or all of their applications in the cloud by having the flexibility to quickly move them to the cloud and bring them up as needed." The trick is how to realize that dream without breaking the budget. This week that dream moved closer to becoming a reality with Symantec and Microsoft stepping up to the plate and announcing a strategic relationship to extend Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows to the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform. (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)

You hear the words and phrases repeated in legal offices, data centers, break rooms, and boardrooms: liability, indemnity, retention, regulators, act of discovery, compliance. The discomforting sound of Information Governance contains echoes of cost, complexity, inconvenience, and potential penalties. (read more)

Enterprises have been hearing about the value and veracity of public cloud for years even as Symantec has been getting feedback on its value proposition from its public cloud customers. The message that Symantec has received is that "ripping and replacing" is not an option. Rather enterprises want and need revolutionary infrastructure with evolutionary products and prices. (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)

It is no secret that virtualization is changing everything about how organizations think about and manage their data centers. But perhaps one of the more dramatic changes in thinking that still needs to take place is in how they should approach disaster recovery (DR). The odds of this shift in thinking occurring sooner rather than later just got a boost as a result of the announcement of a new replication software solution from a new company called Zerto that emerged from stealth mode this week. (read more)

As I was watching the local 10 o'clock news last night to catch up on the latest on the flooding in the surrounding Omaha area, I was hit by a piece of unexpected news. The Army Corps of Engineers had earlier in the day released a map and began to warn residents that a major portion of downtown Omaha could be under as much as 10 feet of water should a levee that borders the Missouri River fail. Yet what many do not know is that the Omaha area is the home for datacenters of many of the world's largest and most well-known Internet companies such as Google, Paypal and Yahoo. (read more)

Tsunamis in Japan.Floods in the Midwest.Super cells and tornados throughout the South (and even the North!) As these news stories make headlines, they should serve as a reminder that no business, even small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), are immune from disasters and the need to recover from them. But as more SMEs adopt disk as their primary backup target, they need a practical D2D2D (disk-to-disk-to-disk) solution that ensures they can recover from a disaster should it occur. (read more)

Having come out of the data center and spent many years now as an analyst, it is difficult for me to get overly excited about any new storage technologies that I see at Storage Networking World (SNW.) While these technologies are most certainly "cool," in the stoic world of storage the odds of them going "hot" are often slim. But at this Spring 2011 SNW, the Nimbus Data Systems S-class and HP Data Protector Instant Recovery look to have above average chances of breaking through. (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)

Sometimes it is difficult to put a price tag on "peace of mind" especially as it relates to having the confidence that application data can be recovered regardless of the scope of the disaster. But today more IT administrators are finding that elusive peace of mind. One such individual is Bill Ellis, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor, Inc., whose confidence in his ability to recover data got a huge boost after testing and implementing the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) solution. (read more)