CIOL: How well the industry is prepared to manage an impending disaster?
SA: In general, most organizations that depend on data for running key business processes are preparing themselves to manage a potential disaster. NetApp's objective is not only to bring to such customers our field-proven, industry leading solutions, but also to offer them our established consulting services, based on best practice expertise of our global professional services organization, to help them in BC planning.

CIOL: Is one-stop solution possible to ensure business continuity?
SA: Business continuity planning has to account for redundancy of different IT infrastructure layers - storage, network access, servers, applications, peripherals. We must not forget the most important component - people. While vendors at each layer have solutions for DR, the job of integrating various layers and implementing DR as a one-stop shop is usually performed by systems integrators. In some cases, enterprises first prefer third-party consultancy firms to assess and plan a BC implementation; and then they decide on the infrastructure for the same.

CIOL: What must be the steps taken by an organization, in terms of best practice, to prevent a possible potential disaster?
SA: Prevention is better than cure, they say! Where organizations have a choice, the first step is to choose the right location i.e. not to locate the primary data center in earthquake or flood-prone areas. Once the location is chosen, the organization needs to look at following aspects of planning their primary data center.

• physical infrastructure (e.g.,. power supply redundancy, fireproofing)
• Environmental (e.g., cooling)
• Connectivity infrastructure (e.g., phone lines, datacom links and redundancy, thereof)
• Technical infrastructure: Hardware, network, applications, storage, IT management.

At regular intervals, it is suggested that organizations have practice drills to sensitize personnel on what to do if a disaster strikes. The drill serves the purpose of testing the organization's readiness to respond to a disaster situation. However, the practice drill need not be restricted to IT systems only. It may cover a drill covering all functional areas. For e.g., an organization with an office in a high-rise building might want to test readiness to disaster by having a mock fire drill.

Organizations need to be fully prepared for a potential disaster; and have policies/procedures in place to minimize the losses arising out of a disaster.

CIOL: What are the popular solutions available in the market for DRP? What should be the basis for selecting DRP? Should recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) be the barometer or should it be dependent on the tuation?                                                                                         : SA: There are several considerations to be made when deciding which type of disaster recovery solution to implement:

•  Is your goal high availability, ongoing backup and recovery, or remote recovery in the event of a site disaster?
•  Which applications need protection? Not all applications are equal, so you need to tier applications based on how critical they are and have different sets of RPOs for each application tier.
• What is your RPO in case of a disaster? A zero RPO implies no data loss, which can only be addressed by a synchronous replication solution. This requires a high-bandwidth network and can only mirror sites that are no more than 100 km apart. If you can afford to go with a higher RPO, an asynchronous replication solution with RPO in minutes or hours is much more flexible and cost-effective and has the ability to provide coverage for more of your applications.
• What is your RTO in case of a disaster?
• How far away from the primary storage site will the disaster recovery site be located? This will depend on the likely geographic impact of the disaster that you are protecting against. Many large organizations tend to mirror between their existing geographically distributed data centers as it eliminates the cost of setting up a new DR site.