Why automated disaster recovery system is needed?

Darshan Joshi

BANGALORE, INDIA: Disaster is quite natural to the human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe. It is like, being governed by prudence, everyone recognizes the need for life insurance and we pay for insurance to cover a catastrophe, should it occur.

Today we are able to predict an impending disaster to an extent, with the technological advances yet, we cannot predict with certainty the amount of damage that a particular disaster might cause. This is true to businesses too, as they are exposed to both natural and manmade disasters, it is imperative for them to plan for contingencies. With this, disaster recovery and disaster preparedness plan becomes very important for the organizations to ensure business continuity and sustainability. IT has a significant role to play in this area.

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Considering today’s fast involving business and IT scenario, it is noticed that organizations have so many applications to manage with such limited resources. It has been observed that one of the top data center concerns is the increasing complexity of applications and their increasing numbers with respect to varied applications. 

Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as somewhat or absolutely important and 50 percent expect “significant” changes to their data centers in 2010*.  Most enterprises say that the applications are growing at a rapid pace and they are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements (SLAs).  One-third of all enterprises say staff productivity is hampered by too many applications. Though this is the current scenario, it is surprising to see only fewer enterprises evaluate their disaster recovery and business continuity plans on a consistent basis. Business continuity is the key objective of all organizations hence it is mission critical to keep processes up and running 24x7. To ensure successful business continuity, it is imperative to have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and a Disaster Recovery Plan in place.

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It is these plans that help organizations prepare for disruptive events and have them function effectively.

However, the creation of and maintenance of a sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan, is a complex undertaking, involving a series of steps. Prior to the creation of the plan, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of disaster and it is important to understand the underlying risks: these are the foundations upon which sound business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan is built. Once the plan is built, it must be maintained, tested and audited to ensure that it remains appropriate to the needs of the organization.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Test Time Objective (TTO)

Two metrics commonly used to evaluate disaster recovery solutions are Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which measures the time between a system disaster and the time when the system is again operational, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which measures the time between the latest backup and the system disaster, representing the nearest historical point in time to which a system can recover.

A third metric that is emerging as a key point of measurement for the effectiveness of recovery alternatives is Test Time Objective (TTO), which measures the ease with which a disaster recovery plan can be tested.

Traditional Disaster Recovery System

While a traditional DR system will help the organization in keeping the RTO and RPO to the minimum, the trouble is that the traditional recovery plans are often difficult to test, difficult to keep up to date, and depend on exact execution of complex, manual processes.

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The traditional disaster recovery system cannot be “turned on” to make sure each change is implemented correctly. While the periodic manual audits of such a system are simply too time-consuming to perform and are also not necessary. Consequently, over the course of a year, thousands of changes may be made to the disaster recovery system, but these changes are not checked regularly.

Further to this the most common causes of disaster recovery failures are nearly impossible to uncover through manual methods, yet they can have very serious implications. For example, replication inconsistencies and errors can result in data loss or increased time to recover. Mapping oversights can cause inconsistent access to critical systems which, in turn, can cause downtime and slow recovery. Improperly configured directories can prevent failover, corrupt data, or even introduce data tampering risk. With these and many other common scenarios, IT often will not even know that a problem exists until an actual recovery is required.

Automated Disaster Recovery System

By continually monitoring the disaster recovery environment and automatically analyzing and reporting on vulnerabilities, an automated disaster recovery tool enables IT to finally know that their recovery plan will actually work in the wake of a disaster.

An automated disaster recovery plan collects configuration information from storage, servers, and databases and uses the gathered information to scan the entire data center environment. The information then is analyzed against a comprehensive database of thousands of “gap signatures”–which are potential vulnerabilities, from common to rare. This knowledge base is automatically expanded and kept up- to-date, thereby obviating the need for IT to manually collect and upload gap signatures.    

Once the data is analyzed, a comprehensive report is automatically generated and provided to IT staff highlighting the problems that were identified and suggesting actions to remediate the issues. The automated system for check high availability and disaster recovery configurations, applications, and storage to make sure the entire environment is included. A ticket is then issued automatically to the appropriate personnel to take action.

Automating for a Successful Recovery

By adopting an automated disaster recovery plan organizations can achieve rapid and cost-effective execution of disaster recovery plans. Specifically, automated disaster-recovery solution carries the following benefits for organizations:

Decreased Downtime — The solution provides extremely fast recovery, saving lost time and productivity trying to get back up and running.

Accurate — The point from which data are recovered is a known point, saving time assessing when the last backups occurred and how to recover lost data.

Ease of deployment -- The solution is easy to set up and administer, allowing smaller businesses with few or limited IT resources to take advantage of it.

Disaster Preparedness — It prepares the enterprise for a variety of disaster and recovery scenarios. Have a viable, easily testable, solution to take to executives. Deliver in crisis situations.

Ease of maintenance— Keeps focus on strategic, revenue generating IT activities by creating a solution that is easy to configure, maintain, and test

In conclusion, an automated disaster recovery system ensures peace of mind and enables the smooth running of an enterprise without disruption of critical business applications. It is prudent for enterprises today to build in a recovery plan that is effective, hassle free and meets the overall IT objectives to ensure business continuity.

*Sourced from the Symantec State of the Data Center Report, 2010-India findings

(The author is : Vice President, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec)