Entries categorized under “Disaster Recovery”

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)

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)

"Hot" or "cold" was a decision that every small and midsize enterprise (SME) faced when it came to determining how to best recover their applications in the event of a disaster. So, while nearly every SME may have wanted a "hot" recovery for their applications, looking at the price tag associated with delivering that option almost always gave them cold feet. However, new backup solutions such as the Revinetix Sentio™ now make it feasible for SMEs to significantly "warm up" their recoveries while keeping the price of recovery very cool. (read more)

Back at the end of July I took a look at why traditional backup software approaches are faltering at managed service providers (MSPs) and new solutions such as those from R1Soft are having such success with these providers. Since then I have had an opportunity to speak with GSI Hosting, an MSP in Kansas City, MO, who explained why it opted for R1Soft's Continuous Data Protection instead of a more traditional backup solution. (read more)

Some seem to think that virtualization for the sake of virtualization is the proper business objective because of how it helps reduce server and storage footprints, utilize physical resources more effectively or ultimately lower costs. Certainly these are proper short term goals but the real end game of virtualization is not simply to create a virtualized data center environment. It is to create one that fully automates IT operations. (read more)

Those who attend VMworld for the first time (this was my third) always walk away in a bit of state of shock. Because until you attend this event, it is hard to describe the fundamental shift that is occurring in organizations and how virtualization is poised to completely transform how every size organization from the enterprise all the way down to the consumer does business. (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)

One of the privileges I get in being contracted to do blogging is that I get to speak to customers to which others rarely get access. One set of customers that I frequently speak with are managed service providers (MSPs) and discuss with them what technologies that they are having success with in their data centers. So this is why I can say with a high degree of certainty that continuous data protection (CDP) is taking over within their data centers and is shaping up to have a high impact as enterprise organizations look to move their applications and application data into the cloud. (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)

One of the key concerns that businesses have is how providers of the cloud will handle and respond to spikes in application demands. It is these questions that InMage's newly announced cloud-optimized infrastructure is designed to answer. (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)

At the conclusion of a recent call I had with Rob Tellone, the CEO of vBC Cloud, he asked me, "What do you consider the difference between business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)?" I gave him my definition of each but then went on to explain to him that on the business side of the house no one really cares about the definition of either BC or DR. At the end of the day, all they care about is how quickly and cost effectively IT can bring the affected parts of their business back online regardless of the scope of the incident. (read more)

Server virtualization was one of the hot technology trends in 2009 and there is every reason to believe it will remain that way in 2010. But as this trend broadens to include the virtualization of mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, new considerations come into play. Most notably, organizations must identify a data protection solution that can deliver application-consistent recovery points, bring applications quickly back online and do so without negatively impacting the performance of the physical host. (read more)