This spells disaster

Ian Masters, Sales and Marketing Director of Double-Take Software, tells FST that it’s not always the big global factors that can affect your business continuity plans.

Really, it’s about looking at some of the little “d” disasters. Often when people are talking about business continuity and disaster recovery, they’re thinking about the major incidents, especially at the moment with the market how it is. The problems that are affecting the financial industry, with terrorism being so ripe, with things like the UK floods of last year and the storms of March this year, people are looking at the bigger global factors that affect their business; however, it’s often the little disasters that actually cause more problems.

Go and ask an IT administrator, “What’s your biggest headache?” and he’ll probably tell you, “Recovering a user’s file from tape when he’s deleted it accidentally.” This is the problem of Operational Recovery. All those little disasters – user deleted files, emails lost that you need for audit purposes – well, there are solutions available. An extension to our product line is a product called TimeData, which provides that operational recovery. We’re not trying to replace tape necessarily, but what we are saying is that within your local site, the IT administrator should be able to recover individual files and emails with a couple of clicks of the mouse. It should only take a few minutes to restore that file either to the previous version that was just deleted or potentially back to an earlier point in time if necessary.

This can then become part of your whole business continuity, disaster recovery strategy. By combining this with replication, you’ve also got the ability to restore individual files, emails or restore files to previous points in time across the wide area network. This is perfect from a compliance point of view, for an audit trail point of view, and more importantly, it can ease the burden of restoring from tape.

What is really interesting is when talking to end users I find myself still having the same conversation I had about ten years ago, certainly when it comes to IT business continuity and disaster recovery. It doesn’t seem to have moved on a great deal. There are still lots of companies out there that don’t realise the range of technology available. There are still plenty of companies out there that are relying solely on tape backup for their continuity and recovery. We need to continue to drive business continuity and disaster recovery at boardroom level and make it something that all businesses consider. Everyone should go through the process of undertaking a risk assessment and business impact analysis and then make decisions on what is actually required for their business. Surprisingly, everyone will require a plan of some sort and the level of that plan will be dependent on each individual business. What I think will change dramatically in this marketplace is the ability to make use of your business continuity infrastructure as a dynamic infrastructure.

Traditionally, business continuity infrastructures have been thought of as either tape backup, or getting data offsite. Now, it can be much more. With the combination of replication solutions and virtualisation, comes the ability to monitor and move workloads around, and these dynamic infrastructures actually deliver the business continuity and disaster recovery requirements they need.

The future
In time, we’re going to see the ability to start spinning off additional servers, so if a particular application reaches capacity and becomes a risk to your business, we will see the ability to move workloads around whenever you need to. You might have a particular application that runs at 50% capacity most of the time, but once or twice a month, it needs to hit 150%, so you actually need to spin up a new server to deliver the extra capacity, and that is where the future lies.

For those who have thought about business continuity and disaster recovery and have implemented a continuity infrastructure, this infrastructure can prove to be very dynamic. Products like ours that give you the ability to move information or technology systems anytime, anywhere and for whatever purpose, will do that very well, and IT managers won’t have to give up their weekends to do recoveries.