DR: Can Tragedy turn into a Grin?

INDIA: A TOP Secret is about to unfold. If you can keep your phone away for a few minutes and concentrate intensely on the tips we are about to share, your nightmares will evaporate like they never existed. Just shut yourself in a far-off cabin, get invisible for the world and those email pigeons and soon relief is going to plop right there on your face.

Before we get started, we all would need to turn out our sleeves and shake off some safely-tucked confessions on the table. Yes, we all get scared of them. Yes, ‘scared' is an under-rated word - may be violently intimidated or bullied or paralysed? Whatever the word, we all get the drift.

Yes, the probability of being picked first on the altar has been ridiculously high. And finally, yes, we all share those drops of sweat and still pay through our nose to face those blood-curdling 45 minutes.

Kapil, Sugar Sammy, Papa CJ, Vir Das - no matter how you name them, the freezing power and brutal force that they wield so effortlessly upon us are almost superhuman.

We all strut into those Comedy caves pretending we are brave enough for all the hammering that is about to unfold, but deep down, we are all saying our best prayers to let the evening pass without any casualties.

But practice, patience and espionage (we managed to sneak some notes out of some veterans' pockets) pays sooner or later; and here we are, spilling some tried-and-tested manoeuvres for your benefit.

Enjoy and next time do not let any apprehension besiege you from relaxing and really laughing (instead of feigning a stupid guffaw) as you face a stand-up comedian in full steam and confidence.

Tip 1: Never sit in the front row. Even if it comes for free and with a Chardonnay

Let us try explaining this with something familiar. If you are related to IT departments by any sliver of chance you would know how slippery it is to equip your business with all those technological muscle and yet be always worried about ‘what if it there's a fire or a flood' kind of thoughts. DR, Disaster Recovery management, as we call it is nothing very different from making through a comedy-show unscathed.

Remember the basics of DR? Always avoid the spotlight. Find a back row where your critical applications, processes, data are safely pinned up. If your business happens to be in a front-row location, go for a DR centre that is poised at a safer harbour - strategically and geographically.

 

Do not hazard the mistake of thinking that all this trouble is unnecessary.

Even your DR friends are stepping the momentum up. Aman Munglani - Research Director at Gartner is clear when he outlines how with socioeconomic turbulence in many regions of the world and changes to corporate governance affecting many parts of a business, strong and well-documented disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning is becoming essential for all enterprise data centers.

Get the sub-text?

Planning is crucial. You can't just walk in at a Comedy station and randomly perch yourself.

The crowd and mise-en-scene around you is not the same anymore, just the way a DR manager is perturbed by the confluence of cloud, social, mobile and information, the pace of technology adoption and conversion to meaningful business returns.

Munglani remarks that many heads of infrastructure have reported that their business executives are increasingly asking for greater speed in application deployment, change management, technology adoption, etc. However, they also feel compelled to maintain appropriate levels of risk management (disaster recovery/business continuity, compliance, data protection, etc.) and are forced to maintain costs.

Manage the risk, in advance and with a full-proof plan. Do not buy that ticket unless you have a candid chat with your DR manager on how trends are changing these days.

For instance, compliance is coming in as a driver for sure with regulatory bodies becoming stringent but that as a reason has been around for some time. "Increase in number of disasters is the second most important driver and as we see major headlines around incidents lot of reactions and readiness-planning inevitably follows. In this digital hyper connected world, no business can afford a downtime so that's another reason driving DR. Also a number of organizations in India are dealing with aged infrastructure and with new procurements they are no longer looking at disaster recovery and business continuity as a separate specialized project plan, but an integral part of the overall data center strategy." Munglani stresses.

Show-tickets later, position-tactics first, hope you understood? Treat the evening like war and you will have a bandage or two less to whine about.

That taken care of; let's talk about some blunders you better avoid.

Now, what if you end up wearing a blingy-blue or loud-lavender shirt to the show? Well, that's almost the terminal stage, but let's attempt what we can

 

Tip 2: Wear what's in-vogue, not Crocs, lest you want to get noticed the wrong way

How to explain this fashion-fine-print to men? Well, what if we told you that you can run your heavy and critical infrastructures on old network technologies and hardware environments? You will either give a condescending look or be shocked to disbelief right?

Spot-on. Now that's exactly what happens when you swagger inside a Comedy-night group and do not spare a look at the retro-decade outfit you are wearing or that golden button that is accentuating your potbelly. Ask Kapil how he hunts his humour-victims and you would know how gullible poor deers can be.

You must definitely know why WAN or virtualization is in. So you must know what's in and what's just oh-so-out. When an organization optimizes its WAN, there is a marked improvement in the network infrastructure which translates to an increase in the effectiveness of the Disaster Recovery solution deployed by the enterprise; Kaura translates the ‘fashionable' here in for network folks.

In fact, Gartner's worldwide surveys and end-user inquiries during the past four years have shown a growing interest in bolstering backup with additional data protection capabilities, and respondents most frequently cite network-attached storage (NAS) and block storage array snapshot capabilities as the technologies they are turning to.

Large server virtualization environments, in particular, have seen a high adoption rate of storage controller snapshots. Server virtualization is continuing to transform the manner in which disaster recovery is managed, especially for both Microsoft Windows and Linux-based computing platforms. The replication, testing and restart of virtual machines at remote recovery facilities are being increasingly adopted by Gartner clients as less costly and more flexible alternatives to the use of more traditional subscription recovery services, Munglani observes.

Does that mean, wearing what Ranbir or Clooney dons will emigrate you from the danger zone?

Actually, no, if you still are not sure of your strategy of staying low-key during the show. Do not shout or whistle or carried away in any manner whatsoever.

Listen to how Tarun Kaura, Director, Technology Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec, dissects Virtualization here. "It can help lower costs, and increase agility; but it can also introduce new challenges and complexities in IT environments that are increasingly both physical and virtual. Whether you are managing a physical or virtual infrastructure, or both, your RPO and RTO are still the biggest factors in managing planned and unplanned downtime. Virtualization can reduce planned downtime by providing the flexibility to move application workloads from one server to another during maintenance operations, without impacting the end user. Yet, Virtualization by itself is not a panacea for high availability and disaster recovery. To leverage virtualization in demanding production environments, you will need to ensure that your architecture and management processes address the requirements of dynamic virtual environments without sacrificing service-level commitments."

Confused? Don't be. Let's distill more stuff ahead now.

 

Tip 2: Forget Tapes, Love Thy Neighbour

There is no way anyone can make you vanish once those impish eye-powers of Sugar Sammy land in your direction. Not even God. But still, if you have someone interesting sitting beside you, the damage can still seem softened. Either the person sitting next to your chair will steal the thunder (literally) or just the fact that there is no one to single out may leave your row in as good a shape as before Sammy casted his look that side. Hide behind a group and let the spine-chilling moment pass.

Another option is to stay physically absent and watch the re-run online. Since you are on the Internet, even CJ won't be able to chase you and stab you unwarned with his jokes. But no matter what you do, try looking for options beyond that duct tape you carry in your pocket with pointless hopes of wrapping them around that comedian's mouth or your ears, just in time. Tape is passé, fuzzy is in.

DRaaS, or DR as a Service, would be a good metaphor here. You must have heard of how Cloud has made inroads in the seemingly-invisible terrain of DR. In fact, just the way cloud is slotting different enterprises together or in a physically-away format, you need to learn the skills of being there and yet not 'there'.

Kaura might explain this better. DRaaS, he highlights, is a compelling approach to protect your systems and data. "It offers numerous benefits and is certainly more dependable and easier to manage than a tape-based solution. If your tapes are close to the area affected by the disaster, they are subject to the same risks as your primary site. If they are far away, RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) issues crop up. DR as a service provides customers with a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional DR. Many organizations have been looking for a way to automate the recovery of production data in the event of an outage that has the potential to disrupt business for hours."

Now if you are wondering how not sitting alone in the eye of the storm and having a partner or a friend or a seat on the rooftop might come to rescue when Vir Das is about to pick his prey in the audience, hear something more.

According to Munglani, at a concept level it is a very relevant topic for discussion in Indian market and says that they are seeing interest among Indian CIOs for the same. "The entire DR market has seen phenomenal growth in the last one and half years incidentally, specially when it comes to sectors like manufacturing or BFSI. We might see major deals getting finalized this year. So certainly DR per se is in spotlight and a lot of service providers are coming up in this space. You might see some early adopters and entrants in the market as we move on." He hints.

See? If the back row seat you were planning to pick is already over-booked (because there could be more smart people reading such tips and getting comedy-savvy) or if consequentially, that seat is too much for you to afford, you can always hope that sitting in a safer zone would blur you out.

Same like DRaaS, which as Kaura spells out, is usually based on infrastructure that leverages virtualization to protect systems and data across geographic risk zones. By leveraging the cloud as a remote recovery site, an organization is protected against disaster at home.

"Leveraging cloud computing as a Disaster Recovery (DR) target addresses business continuity needs for organizations that cannot afford a secondary site or at-a-distance failovers for mission-critical, virtualized workloads. Symantec allows enterprises to move away from information islands to an information management platform that is architecture and infrastructure agnostic. Enterprises can efficiently manage information by deduplicating everywhere and deleting with confidence. With newer service based models coming into play, it is imperative for companies to understand the customers' requirements today, based on which data deduplication solutionscan be customized." He underlines the need for catching up with the speed the world is moving here.

 

If you are still being haunted by old habits and want to keep a tape handy nonetheless, Anand Sukumaran, Vice President - Managed Services, ITC Infotech helps with some assurance. Tapes are here to stay for some time despite giving way to disk-based backup, he consoles.

" In 2010 IBM and Fujitsu had announced that it had recorded 29.5 Billion bits per square inch on tape (about 35TB uncompressed) and this year Sony and IBM claims they have managed to record 148 gigabits per square inch (about 185 TB uncompressed). Though the technology is not yet available commercially it is evident that significant research and development is happening in this area."

Sukumaran, whose company, provides consulting services in data centre assessment area and assisting customers in their implementation also offers DRaaS and sees a huge potential henceforth.

Leveraging the cloud for DR is picking up and improvements in technologies and related solutions have made this possible, he still reminds. May be because by leveraging cloud services there is no need for underutilized dedicated infrastructure to have DR solutions in place. "With multi-tenancy, automation and rapid deployment techniques there is a great improvement in SLAs, RPO/RTO at lowered costs. One must also pay attention to security, data protection and compliance while evaluating DRaaS as a solution and drawing up the contract."

In Munglani's radar, the evolution of cloud storage is driven by market demand pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership for storage necessitated by the rapid growth of data and the operational costs of maintaining high-growth internal storage infrastructures. "Based on client interactions. Enterprise customers are focusing on hybrid solutions that bridge on-premises storage with public services as they test the capability and prove viability of public cloud storage for their use cases."

Tape or cloud, be sure that you are not left-out when it comes to the best seats.

Tip of all tips: Meet the comedian back-stage and develop an understanding

You can pose as a (or simply over-act the reality of being a) fan who worships them or beseech for an autograph (which, by the way, would be a good trophy too if you can manage it). What will happen is that way they will register your face/name as someone who is not to be violated by his random predatory instincts. This may not be an agreement in stone but can come in wieldy in its own subtle, nuanced force.

After all don't you sign tough SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for DR all the way? Have you not been changing their contours too much already? From what we hear, there is a new state of SLAs, RTO, RPO (Recovery Point Objectives), Rollover metrics etc happening all around.

 

Organizations are seeking significant improvements in their backup practices, knowing that the backup process needs to be dramatically, not incrementally, improved, Mungali lets on. "Users should be careful about what they are getting into. Look at RTOs, charge-backs and other economic aspects well before getting into something here. Also look at how much ad hoc or usable capacity is being charged. Have a clear picture of what you want. Do not get caught up in marketing talks of vendors. Be clear of what is mission critical for you and what recovery or availability levels you want." He recommends well, something what we already told you about maneuvering your way out as a fan.

To cut it short, Munglani advises CIOs that sophisticated disaster recovery strategies are needed due to the growing risk of availability failure. The use of snapshot and replication techniques, IT services failover to multiple data centers, and BCM planning software will improve the effectiveness and maturity of your BCM program.

"Before additional investments are made, question incumbent and potential backup and recovery software vendors about their road maps for new data protection capabilities. Develop a two- to three-year strategy for transitioning from the use of mission-critical application recovery testing to a phased implementation of application failover. And yes, be careful and do not be swayed by the media hype or sales pitches which vendors are usually good at. Look at RPO, availability, future and stability of vendor as well the whole economics of cloud in this space before venturing into DRaaS. DR modernization projects often require a significant amount of implementation time (sometimes as long as three to four years) before full project completion is actually achieved."

Exactly something that we wanted to equip the comedy-victim in you with - Stay sharp, stay discreet, stay invisible, do not blindly imitate your spouse's tactics, strategise when you buy those tickets, and if all else fails, and Sammy or Kapil still zooms the camera or finger on to you - and your sense of humour doesn't match up to the occasion - Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati.

Disasters can strike anytime, but you can still recover out of them - and with a genuine laugh.

Comedy Ha! Bring it on!