My blog posts and tweets are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my current employer (ESG), my previous employers or any other party.
I do not do paid endorsements, so if I am appear to be a fan of something, it is based on my personal experience with it.
If I am not talking about your stuff, it is either because I haven't worked with it enough or because my mom taught me "if you can't say something nice ... "
Data protection processes and technologies are vital to ensuring an organization’s operational, regulatory, and financial health. As a result, data protection infrastructure is included in every IT budget and is top of mind for data center staff. However, due to the complexity and often high cost of backup, restore, and disaster recovery, many organizations are willing to invest in methods and solutions that can save time, reduce costs, and simplify management.
In fact, ESG’s 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey reveals that improving data backup and recovery is the most commonly identified IT priority over the next 12-18 months. Earlier ESG research exploring data protection priorities indicates that the most significant data protection investments were in the areas of:
Improving disaster recovery (35%)
Backing up virtual server environments (30%)
Improving application backup (26%)
and desktop/laptop backup and recovery (23%)
For years, Microsoft has delivered Volume Shadow copy Services (VSS) for third-party backup mechanisms to help achieve these goals. More recently, Microsoft System Center’s Data Protection Manager has also been offered to help satisfy the needs of Windows customers that are very much in-line with ESG research findings:
Improving disaster recovery – Through a feature Microsoft refers to DPM-2-DPM-4-DR, DPM replicates data from secondary onsite storage to tertiary offsite storage, including to third-party partner clouds
Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines – DPM offers both host-based and guest-based options
Improving application backups – DPM uses only VSS-based or other application-supported methods developed in alignment with System Center’s peers in Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint
Desktop/laptop protection – This was first released in DPM 2010 (v3), including online and offline scenarios
This week, Microsoft announced the availability of the Release Candidate for its System Center 2012 management products, including v4 of Data Protection Manager.
What is new in 2012
I spent some time talking with Microsoft on what was coming in DPM in 2012, with key features being:
Centralized Console using Operations Manager, thereby also providing better integration of DPM functionality across the System Center line
Enhanced SharePoint recovery options
Better Hyper-V protection capabilities, including the ability to run DPM within a VM
and Generic Data Source Protection for non-Microsoft applications that run on Windows
Click here to read the ESG brief of DPM in System Center 2012
Thursday, January 19 – the System Center Universe 2012 community-driven event will be going through many of the technologies in that release.
Am very excited to be speaking about data protection at the System Center Universe 2012 event in Austin on January 19th. The SCU planners were kind enough to invite me, along with a great lineup of Microsoft program managers/speakers and industry SME’s to talk about what is coming soon.
The in-person event is sold-out in Austin, but you are welcome to watch the live all-day event from several local user-group venues or via the web. Originally, I had intended to share the data protection hour with a DPM MVP, but it appears I will be going solo. So, I hope that I remember how this stuff works.
With twenty years of backup experience, you might presume that my own personal backups might be flawless and in triplicate. And for my professional workstation, it actually is. But admittedly, for the rest of my data, such as those invaluable family photos, personal data and other stuff – it admittedly isn’t as well or frequently protected as it should be. This lines up with the old phrases:
The plumber’s house always leaks.
The cobbler’s kids have no shoes.
And here I am, preaching not just on data protection topics, but also the plight of the SMB (most recently blogged on SMB DR) … but my own non-recreate-able data isn’t protected as well as I know that it could and should be.
This isn’t that different from the reality that many IT professionals deal with every day. Your data center may be well protected (or presumed so) … but your branch offices’ data, or maybe just your one-off workloads, are barely protected at all.
So, as part of 2012, I decided to ‘eat my own dogfood’ and sign up with a cloud-based backup service. Since I recently contributed to some ESG Lab assessments of Asigra and was impressed by their 1) commitment to security, 2) their longevity as a BaaS platform and 3) their commitment to the channel – I decided to go with them, which then meant finding an MSP in my area.
To my happy surprise, I found The Harding-Group in Dallas. The “happy” in that claim comes from a few points:
They were in the Dallas, so I might be able to ask for a site visit as my experiment moves forward.
Many years ago, I had previously worked with THG as a reseller of software that I to used offer – so I knew their reputation.
And this is the big one, THG wasn’t just a no-name telco but a technology consultant to many SMBs (among other companies).
I love that!
I have long believed that the best off-site data protection provider for any SMB is their friendly neighborhood IT consultant/integrator. In fact, I lamented on it in my book and here is why …
Q > If you are an SMB and your stuff breaks badly, who are you going to call?!
A > The professionals who helped you put it in and maintain it!!! So, who better to have your offsite backups than them?
Now, without looking behind the scenes as to the Harding Group’s business plans and choice to deliver the service (or choose which technology to offer it through, such as Asigra), I will likely never know the whole story. But the fact that reputable integrators who are trusted by their SMB customers to recommend, deploy, and maintain solutions for SMBs are also able to offer backup-as-a-service to those clients is a wonderful boon that more SMBs should look into adopting.
Look for more blog posts on my personal experience with cloud-backup over the next several weeks as I fulfill some of my New Years Resolutions, one of which is to back up my own stuff better.
“We’re small – so we can’t afford enterprise stuff”
“We only have 40 people. If we have to recreate something, it isn’t too bad“
Respectfully, none of these are reasons — they are all excuses — and they are mostly inaccurate.
The US Dept. of Labor once surveyed what happened to small businesses who experienced a significant crisis, including fires, hurricanes, tornados, etc. What they found is that not all businesses were able to re-open at all. Some that did eventually re-open later closed for good because they weren’t able to re-capture their clientele. Overall, the survey found that 2/3 of those SMBs failed because of a major crisis. I would suggest that the primary cause was a lack of preparedness, likely because of one of the reasons above — so let’s revisit them.
“All we can afford is tape”
WRONG — no one, of any size, can only afford tape. For most crises, ranging regional weather catastrophes to single hard-drive failures, you don’t need last month’s or last year’s data from tape. What you need is yesterday. You need it online, now! By definition, that is not tape — that is disk. The reality is that what you cannot afford is “just” tape. Whether you start with an external disk drive or engage with a cloud-backup provider, you can afford something (anything) better than tape.
“We’re small — so we can’t afford enterprise stuff”
PARTIALLY TRUE – you can’t afford “enterprise stuff”. But hey, you don’t need enterprise stuff since you aren’t an enterprise. If you did run an enterprise infrastructure, with all of its scale and complexity, then you could afford enterprise stuff. But you don’t because you are an SMB. As an SMB, you’ll likely have a more straightforward collection of IT assets, such as file serving devices, some applications which are likely based on some SQL platform, perhaps a mail platform or two (unless you run from a cloud-provider) and perhaps a custom application platform. The great news is that these kinds of platforms are very cost-effectively protected. File serving can replicate, either within the file system (e.g. Windows Server DFS) or the storage layer, applications like databases and email can often replicate between multiple instances — often yielding not only resiliency but higher performance due to load balancing. Any server platform that isn’t natively resilient can usually be encapsulated into a virtual machine and then replicated and re-booted from a mirrored virtualization host.
The punch-line: you don’t need “enterprise stuff” to protect your SMB IT infrastructure. In fact, in many cases, resiliency features are already built in to what you already own.
“If we have to recreate something, it wouldn’t be too bad”
Almost definitely WRONG, because most SMB data is unique. This means that if something took you 60 minutes to do the first time, it will likely take you 45-50 minutes to recreate something that was done recently and potentially 90 minutes to recreate older content that you still need. You’ll potentially gain some efficiency because you already have the intended outcome in your head — but it still will take the majority of time to repeat. But if you lose several days of data, can your SMB workforce tolerate the several days of recreating work that you’ve already done and likely already gotten paid for.
Since I’ve tried to dispel some presumptions, here are some factual SMB IT realities:
Limited Cashflow
One of the key differences between how enterprises and SMBs tolerate crises is cash flow. Based on the kinds of business that has recurring and/or pipelined revenue or just because their bank accounts are bigger, they are often able to suffer cash flow issues while they reconstruct. SMBs typically lack those deep coffers or assured income, so it is even more important that SMBs proactively deal with business continuity since they won’t be able to roll up their sleeves and bear through their recovery efforts
Limited Expertise
Another reality is that most SMBs don’t have deep IT veterans on-staff and waiting to throw on their superhero cape and jump into action during a crisis. This isn’t meant as a disparagement, as I know several IT Pro’s that work in SMB who have built near-enterprise quality and services into their smaller IT infrastructure. But as is much more common, I have met many brilliant IT implementers working for systems integrators and consultants, who provide their services to SMBs. In this way, SMBs get deep IT expertise when they need it (billable), but don’t have to pay for it when they don’t — often as a project-level supplement to their in-house part-time IT person. And like most things in IT, that works great when everything is working … and is painful when something breaks. First, because when an SMB has an urgent outage, the right guy may not be available for immediate resolution. And secondly, while the SMB is down and likely losing revenue, they have to do the one thing that they don’t want to — pay for something expensive, a billable IT expert.
So, what is an SMB to do?
Invest pennies now … instead of dollars later. Today, most key workloads that an SMB relies upon are natively resilient — if you turn the features on:
SQL Server and Exchange both offer replication with transparent failover through Database Mirroring and DAG, respectively.
Windows infrastructure services (AD/DNS) are natively resilient and easily solvable with a simple secondary instance (running in a VM)
Windows Server (file services) has DFS to transparently replicate/load-balance and resume service between servers and sites
Even virtualization platforms can be made resilient for far less money than you might think
The reality is that SMBs arguably need resiliency as much, if not more than, some enterprises — and the tools that they need are more often than not already owned by them. I am so passionate on this (using the built-in HA/DR technologies that you’ve already paid for) … that I wrote a whole book on it = Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers … also viewable at DataProtectionBible.com.
Whether you read the book or not; if you are an SMB, look at what core workloads that you are running in your shops – and then look in their product documentation for “availability” or “replication”. You may be happily surprised with what you find – and already own.
First, let me say that I have been a fan of the Nook since it came out. I owned an original, have two Nook Colors, and bought a Nook Tablet on its first week. In total, my family has 5 devices, along with umpteen book and apps.
But all of that fidelity waned today – because of Netflix.
When my kids, my in-laws or I use the home screen of my Nook Tablet … we now see “Jackass” recommendations from Netflix. (literally)
To be clear, I don’t use Netflix and don’t want to. It turns out that you cannot uninstall the Netflix application, nor can you hide its recommendations to you.
My Nook Color with the latest update does not show Netflix recommendations, even though it can now use Netflix too … but my Nook Tablet does.
—
Since Nook Color doesn’t show Netflix recommendations but Nook Tablet does … it must be a switch in the software, right?
I emailed B&N Tech Support
B&N’s “ProfessionalSupport@Book.com” folks told me how to install the NetFlix app. (I hate canned responses that don’t read the question – Maik)
So, I emailed again, asking them to actually read my question – explaining I did not want to install, I wanted to stop seeing vulgarity.
And B&N’s Kent told me how to install the Netflix application. (Double Fail)
I called B&N Tech Support
The first person told me to go to BN.com to delete the app – but you can’t delete Netflix, because it is pre-loaded.
Then, she told me to delete or archive it from the Tablet’s screen – but you can’t delete Netflix, because it is pre-loaded.
According to escalated B&N tech support: if I start a monthly subscription to Netflix, it may show recommendations that are more appropriate.
Notably, Jorge was the only person who actually seemed to understand my question – and said that he would send the request up for a future release. In fact, he later exceeded my expectations by actually following up in email to let me know that he confirmed NetFlix was not hide-able from the Nook Tablet’s menu and that the suggestion was sent to the developers. It still seems weird that my Nook Color 1.4.1 doesn’t show it, but my Nook Tablet (also 1.4.0) does. But I appreciated Jorge trying – and following up.
Embedding Netflix so tightly (and visibly) into the Nook might be reasonable if B&N owned Netflix and were therefore trying to drive awareness of their sister products – but they aren’t. Interestingly, Hulu is also part of my Nook Tablet, but they didn’t get the advertising…
While I wanted the longer battery life, I was already disappointed to learn that of the 2X memory between my old Nook Color and the new Nook Tablet, less of it (1MB) is available to me. The rest of the Nook Tablet’s memory is only usable by B&N purchased content. Of course, I can add a microSD memory card … but I could have done that on my Nook Color, especially now that it has the same 1.4 software features.
I may try taking back my Nook Tablet to the local B&N store … but if the other avenues of ‘Customer Service’ are any indication, I expect that it is non-returnable at this point.
Dear B&N – please let me know when we can actually use the 16GB that you are selling … and when you are not so tightly coupled to a dissatisfactory third-party app and service.
Dear Netflix – if I could watch movies offline, since a good part of my Nook usage is in airplanes, then I might actually get a subscription. Until then, please leave my eReader alone.
This project was interesting to me not only because of the technology itself, but because it was the first ESG Lab project that I had the opportunity to be part of since joining the team. One of the features I appreciated most was the Thin Provisioning capability. So, I thought I would share a little video of what we played with and why I liked it:
The whole process can be automated even more than how it was shown here, but this workflow let me talk through it a little more thoroughly.
Chapter 2, Data Protection by the Numbers (click here to download Chapter 2) covers among other things ROI and TCO. One of the formulas discussed is the “Cost of Downtime”:
Sometimes, the best thing that can happen when you present your methodology and resulting BIA/TCO/ROI justifications for a project is that the business/operational/financial stakeholder challenges your formula (in a constructive way). When working with your business leaders and establishing the formula that you will use in your process, here are a few key ideas to frame the conversation around data protection TCO/ROI:
Working backward, ROI is just a comparison of BIA to TCO.
TCO is simply a prospective invoice, along with some simple assumptions of fixed costs. Likely, any challenges here will be minor tweaks to the fixed values, not wholesale changes to the math.
BIA is where challenges occur—your business stakeholder(s) don’t agree with how you calculated the cost of downtime (see above, earlier in chapter). This is great news because then you can collectively decide why the formula doesn’t apply to a particular business unit or technology resource.
If your discussion circle can collectively agree that when the database server is down for up to a day, employees can catch up on email, or vice versa (and thereby reduces some variable by half), then the collective team has turned your formula into their formula.
If the HR person can provide more specific hourly dollar (Hr) values across a large department (though you are unlikely to get a list of individual salaries), your team now has much more accurate fixed values that both the IT management and the operational management will agree on.
In short, every pushback that can be discussed or refined brings buy-in and agreement by the other parties. When you have five variables to work with, the formula may seem academic. But if you get more accurate modifiers, and the dollar variables are filled in with real numbers, you are only left with the technology numbers, such as:
How often does the server go down?
What is the cost of replacement hardware?
How much do tapes cost?
These numbers are usually easily accessible by IT management and complete the equation. From there, you now have a new BIA that is even more defensible and that now has credibility in the eyes of the other stakeholders. TCO comes from the invoice and projections. ROI is simply the mathematical comparison of the BIA and the TCO.
But now, because everyone has weighed in on the financial values and the relational impact of the formula, everyone believes the ROI, no matter how big or small. Going back to the concern that we had around presumed credibility of the ROI formula:
If the ROI is less appealing (e.g, TCO is 50 percent of BIA), at least everyone was involved in understanding the legitimacy of the numbers, and you have a greater likelihood of them agreeing to the project.
If the ROI is too appealing (e.g, not emotionally credible), you have the simpler problem of working with the vendor through side meetings to educate your stakeholding peers as to the legitimacy of the solution and the higher potential of being that hero by spending $10 to save $100.
Either way, having the initial formulas and variables challenged turns the project from yours to theirs and will help you pay for what you already know you want – or discover what you really need or don’t.
No, I didn’t do a typo and mean to say "Every Windows Server has an iSCSI Initiator"
And it may only be a slight exaggeration when I say "Every".
But did you know that your Windows Server 2008 R2 server can also be an iSCSI Target? I didn’t.
Typically, one thinks of an iSCSI Target as a SAN appliance offering block storage (not files) over commodity Ethernet, instead of Fibre Channel. Then, your production machines use their iSCSI Initiators to connect to it. And voila, a new disk magically appears in your Windows disk administrator view and your Ethernet activity light will likely go crazy from then on; separate network segment and NICs are highly recommended. (slightly oversimplified)
Windows and iSCSI in the past
Starting with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, Microsoft has provided an iSCSI Initiator, for production machines to utilize iSCSI block storage — but with the assumption that those blocks were coming from an iSCSI storage appliance or Storage Server (read on).
For years, Microsoft shipped a special edition of Windows Server through OEM partners like Dell and HP. The OEMs would then take the base server hardware that they shipped and tune it and pre-package it with "Windows Storage Server", which was essentially Windows Server with some tuning for file/storage IO, as well as some differentiating technologies that had not yet been included in the mainline of Windows — particularly technologies that were suited towards appliances. One of those technologies has been an iSCSI Target, so that the Windows Storage Server could be both a file-sharing and block-sharing appliance.
Disclosure: I was Microsoft’s product manager for Windows Storage Server 2008, along with some time with WSS 2003 R2 and leading up to WSS 08 R2. Check out my blog archive for all of my WSS posts: http://centralizedbackup.com/index.php/tag/windows-storage-server, including:
In some ways, WSS was an incubation platform for trying new storage technologies before they might later merge into mainstream Windows Server. The iSCSI Target software was one of the last unique WSS technologies that hadn’t yet made it into WS … until now.
Now, everyone gets it
Last month, I was visiting several product teams in Redmond when one of them mentioned that their iSCSI Target is now available to everyone. What?!?! I hadn’t heard that, did you?
I am a hands-on guy, so as soon as I got back to my office, I tried it and it works! Essentially, you create LUNs by creating VHD’s and then share them as block storage via iSCSI with production clients.
Is a VHD built on top of the Windows File System as fast as native storage? Actually, its pretty close. It didn’t used to be. If you look at the benchmarking and best practice guides put out by the Hyper-V team, they aren’t adamant in saying to use “raw” disk anymore – they say that VHD performance is now equitable. So, at least accessing the VHD blocks are about the same as accessing the file system of that Windows Server. Your network to the server and its underlying storage performance still need to be engineered correctly.
How does it compare with iSCSI appliances, especially those offering CIFS shares for unified storage? Well, in the past, some customers have have moved towards appliances that were offering blocks, and began offering file shares too. Arguably, this levels the playing field a bit, since your Windows Server which already offered files can now offer blocks. OK, maybe not a level playing field, but it changes the conversation.
How is the performance? In my small branch office, it was good. It was relatively easy to set up and I’ve seen no real lag on my machines compared with their local disks versus their iSCSI-mounted storage. Am hoping to eventually do a true ESG Lab validation to put some load on it and really dig in. …
Punch-line
We all know that most server hardware has untapped performance today. Usually, it is an argument for virtualization and consolidation. But what if we were to add non-traditional functions to our server, like block storage? That proposition gets even more interesting if the claims of Windows Server “8” come true.
Do I expect to see iSCSI from Microsoft displace storage appliances within the datacenter? Not yet. There is still huge functionality that appliances offer over just giving blocks (thin provisioning, deduplication, tiering, etc.), where simply serving up the blocks is table stakes. But by that definition, Microsoft and its millions of Windows Servers can now claim to have those table stakes. As to the advanced functionality of a real storage appliance, ask me again after WS”8” has shipped and we see where its R2 is headed.
But in branch offices where you likely already have a Windows Server and may never be able to justify a standalone appliance that offers those storage capabilities, why wouldn’t you download it and see if it met your needs? Of course, you would have to know that it was available, which I and likely many others didn’t — but now you do.
The best part of BC/DR planning is not being prepared for your eventual disaster — its what you get before hand.
In my earlier post, I talked about the 10 professional practices of Business Continuity Planning.
Practices 2 and 3 include "Risk Evaluation and Control" and "Business Impact Analysis". They are essentially about gathering an understanding of what each of your core business processes are, the IT infrastructure that supports them, and a qualitative and quantitative assessment of what would happen if those operations were impacted. Folks this is a very healthy thing that isn’t done enough in corporations. Too often, companies grow their business processes and the supporting IT functions over time and incrementally — but fail to step back and re-assess where they are.
When you start BCDR planning, here is what you’ll get:
Along with reassessing where you are, BCP process 4, “Business Continuity Strategies” starts to look at what kinds of mitigating technologies could be applied to resolve the potential IT faults in your environment:
Invariably, you will end up putting in replication and failover technologies, where standalone servers used to be.
You’ll discover new protection and recovery methods, such as cloud-based backup, that originally seemed unattainable and now appear more cost-effective and reasonable.
You’ll almost definitely become much more aware of the business processes that can be improved.
And, you’ll discover aspects of your infrastructure that could be consolidated or optimized.
Read those words again — optimized, improved, more cost-effective. Of course, you’ll also be ‘prepared‘ but the lesson is that while BC/DR preparedness may be the cause, business optimization is the effect.
The server and storage virtualization that enables booting up an alternative data center during a crisis will also reduce your hardware, power, cooling and space costs now.
The replicated data and resilient applications that ensures continuous operations of your business during a crisis will also assure productivity during a server-level issue or planned migration — and in many cases, improve performance through load balancing throughout the rest of the day and during peak usage hours.
The conversations that you’ll have with your business stakeholders will not only prepare you to be ensure their service during a crisis, it will also almost definitely create conversations where some of those operational processes and procedures can be optimized now. They will also create new dialogs of understanding between the business stakeholders and their IT counterparts which will yield big benefits of empathy and cooperation.
Some of these BC/DR benefits are covered in Chapter 12 of my book — but hopefully, this gets you thinking about BC/DR planning in a new way. While your preparedness and company survival may be the destination, you’ll be amazed how much that you’ll gain during the journey.
It wasn’t that many years ago that ‘Disaster Recovery’ was a key buzz word for IT. Somewhere along the way, it became ‘Business Continuity’. Now days, it is simply a feature of your backup or storage solution. Or is it?
First, let’s talk through the layers from a technology perspective:
Backup & Restoration (B/R)
B/R is about previous versions. On disk, there is an expectation around either rapid recovery – or end-user initiated without helpdesk interaction. Each are good, both are better. On tape, it is all about long-term retention (only). If you are still using tape as a primary means for data restoration or whole-server recovery, then …
High Availability (HA)
HA is about staying running. It used to be about ‘failover’, where warm resources would come online when the primary failed – but these days, HA scenarios rarely miss a beat, because most have figured out how to combine load-balancing methods with HA, whereby when everything is fine, it is shared across devices so that load is optimized. When something fails, the other nodes of the configuration take up the extra slack and the user is never the wiser. An example being Exchange DAG or SQL Mirroring within the application or a web-farm.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
DR is about data survivabilityover distance. In olden days, this would then be followed with the IT and personnel processes to bring the data and services online again from the remote location. But the key, then and now, is that DR from a technology perspective is about data survivability – achievable through the application (e.g. SQL replication), the host (e.g. Windows DFS-R), from a backup application (Microsoft DPM) or the storage array.
Business Continuity (BC)
Simple math: BC = DR + HA … +/- B/R
Said another way: BC is remote (DR) resumption (HA) of services, ideally either transparently resilient or automated such that the decision is manual but the execution is programmatic, with the option of optimized backups (B/R) from the remote site.
Your Remote Replication feature is not my Disaster Recovery
All of the above is from a technology perspective, which is nice and probably worth more detail in another blog post as to what makes offerings in each area desirable, but … there is at least one flaw in the above descriptors. The ‘Remote Replication’ feature in your technology does NOT really equate to DR or BC.
Marketing guys are taught to use action verbs. So while your remote replication feature may genuinely ‘help you with your disaster recovery goals’, many marketing guys (including me in my past roles) shorten it as ‘does disaster recovery’. And somewhere along the way, product developers listen to the marketing guys and product managers, and then the feature or button in the product becomes ‘Disaster Recovery’. But it isn’t! Because real BC/DR isn’t about technology – its about processes and people.
For all of the IT Pro’s who are certified in this technology or that, there is a certification for BC/DR – so let’s look at their defined ‘Professional Practices’ for Business Continuity Planning at www.drii.org/certification/professionalprac.php:
Program Initiation and Management
Risk Evaluation and Control
Business Impact Analysis
Business Continuity Strategies
Emergency Response and Operations
Business Continuity Plans
Awareness and Training Programs
Business Continuity Plan Exercise, Audit & Maintenance
Crisis Communications
Coordination with External Agencies
The punch-line here is that all of the IT technologies and methodologies are applicable to roughly 4 of the 10 aspects of real Business Continuity Planning.
Putting it all together
Are the ‘Disaster Recovery’ features in backup and storage technologies bad? NO, but take them for what they are. Storage that is replicated to a secondary site doesn’t help you with disaster recovery unless its only function is a file server. Unless you also have the ability to bring the services back online, and reconnect the users, and report its restored availability, then it isn’t BC or DR, its RR – Remote Replication.
I won’t say “its is only remote replication” because RR is the secret sauce for ensuring data survivability. And without your data, most of the 10 phases of “real” business continuity planning won’t matter.
The first words and the last words in my book are “Get Your Data Out of the Building” – and remote replication is how you do it. In fact, chapter 12 of the book is around 40 fun-filled pages on how to make BC/DR work within a BCP framework and also how all of it applies to regulatory requirements.
So, embrace Remote Replication (RR) – just don’t call it ‘Disaster Recovery’ or expect it to entirely solve your Business Continuity goals by itself.
Disclaimers:
Yes, as a former (and recovering) marketing guy, I have shortened out the ‘helps’ and ‘may’ phrases for BC/DR technologies.
Yes, I have been a Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP), as well as an IT Pro (MCSE and Novell MCNE).
Yes, these are simply my opinions and yours may be different.
