Category: Inmage

At the conclusion of a recent call I had with Rob Tellone, the CEO of vBC Cloud, he asked me, “What do you consider the difference between business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)?” I gave him my definition of each but then went on to explain to him that on the business side of the house no one really cares about the definition of either BC or DR. At the end of the day, all they care about is how quickly and cost effectively IT can bring the affected parts of their business back online regardless of the scope of the incident.

Server virtualization was one of the hot technology trends in 2009 and there is every reason to believe it will remain that way in 2010. But as this trend broadens to include the virtualization of mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, new considerations come into play. Most notably, organizations must identify a data protection solution that can deliver application-consistent recovery points, bring applications quickly back online and do so without negatively impacting the performance of the physical host.

Even though Gartner Research says that server virtualization is not yet widely implemented (only 16 percent of workloads currently run on virtual machines according to Gartner), Gartner does point to a more virtualized environment in the very near future. It expects that fully 50% of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012 and represent nearly 58 million deployed machines. But as this transition from physical to virtual occurs within data centers, traditional disaster recovery (DR) software, procedures and techniques are not positioned to migrate so cleanly into this newly virtualized environment.

Disaster recovery (DR), testing and development environments have historically been closely linked whether or not anyone liked to admit it. Organizations would construct test and development environments and then use them for DR purposes if needed; or, they would quietly repurpose computer gear purchased using DR funds for testing and development. However the trick is getting both of these distinct but separate business processes to share this same environment without creating new levels of complexity.

This past spring a debate erupted on BackupCentral.com between a user complaining about not getting new features in his backup software as part of his annual maintenance contract and his backup software provider wanting to charge extra for it. The user was, in his words, ‘faithfully paying his annual 20% fee for maintenance’ and now wanted the backup software’s new Advanced Recovery option as part of his support costs.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is on almost every company’s radar screen as a cost-effective means for outsourcing applications that are not core competencies of their IT staff. Yet while outsourcing more applications sounds great in theory, applications such as disaster recovery (DR) that organizations are looking to outsource must support certain characteristics. Specifically, the software needs to support options like partitioning and data security that are inherent in a feature like multi-tenancy.

“Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery” are two aspects of IT and business planning and process management that no organization can afford to get wrong. So it is somewhat disconcerting that a recent article reports that the majority of businesses do not yet have a disaster recovery plan or business continuity process in place or, if they do, they do not regularly test it.

Recent feedback from InMage Systems’ existing customer base indicates that 100% of them use its Scout software for disaster recovery. That probably comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Scout or its heterogeneous recovery capabilities. But what may come as a surprise to some is that nearly 40% of these existing Scout users are seeing a 200% return on investment (ROI) in Scout because of how it can be used in multiple ways in a company’s IT infrastructure.

Most organizations recognize that the introduction of disk into the data protection process is fundamentally changing the landscape of how data is protected. But what organizations are failing to entirely grasp is how disk fundamentally alters how applications can be protected and recovered. Disk can minimize the impact of data protection on production applications while providing shorter recovery times and improving recovery reliability. It is as organizations come to this realization that they also begin to grasp how recovery can displace backup as the next IT headache.

Bounce the phrase “consolidated recovery” off of most individuals in IT and you are just as likely to get a blank stare as a good answer as to what it means or how to accomplish it. Most IT staff keeps so busy on a day to day basis just managing their assortment of backup, clustering and replication products that they never get much beyond focusing on the protection and recovery of each application. So for them to contemplate the consolidation of protection and recovery using just one methodology has more than likely not even crossed their minds.