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Chris A. MacKinnon
Processor.com
February 26, 2010
Full text of original article at Processor.com web site

Disaster Recovery: Are You Falling Short?

Measuring Up Amidst The Challenges

Protecting enormous volumes of data from disasters, complying with complex regulations, controlling rapid data growth, and managing geographically dispersed data centers can all take their toll on small to midsized enterprises. In light of these challenges, data centers need solid disaster recovery plans in place, but what’s more, they need to be up to par. But how can data centers determine if they’re keeping up? And how can they be sure that they’re equipped to handle performance and capacity requirements, recovery time objectives, and changing requirements?

Up To The Challenge

Protecting enormous amounts of data and handling the challenges associated with the effort may be a daunting task for small and medium-sized companies, says Greg Ewald, vice president of marketing at SteelEye Technology (www.steeleye.com). But Ewald says it doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated. He explains, “Small and medium-sized companies are among the first enterprises to move their data resources into the cloud. And the cloud provides these companies with the required solutions for protecting IT resources, as well as ensuring their business meets regulations. In addition, the cloud allows a business to effectively manage its data centers or handle future growth demands.” Ewald says enterprises that currently utilize high availability and data protection solutions will find the same assurances available when using the cloud for data replication and disaster recovery.

Nate Fouarge, director of products at NovaStor (www.novastor.com), says we’re in an era of enormous storage growth, and with that, he says, come many different challenges when talking about creating and maintaining a disaster recovery plan. “One of the biggest challenges is how to back up all this new storage and be able to restore it quickly and effectively,” he says. “You have to have a plan in place according to storage location, [know] how that storage is connected, and determine what data is actually critical. Regulations are also a concern; between security, access time, and retention, there are many things you have to consider when planning for disaster recovery.”

Up To Par?

Disaster recovery plans can only be as good as the service level objectives that are set, according to Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing at Sepaton (www.sepaton.com). When determining if your disaster recovery plan is up to par, Kramer says the service level objective will determine what level of data loss is acceptable and how long the organization can endure being down. He elaborates, “The policies that are currently in place for the customer’s data protection environment need to constantly be revisited, as the quality of service that was acceptable in the past might not deliver on the information needs of the organization today.”

Kramer says disaster recovery plans need to be tested on a schedule that isn’t based solely on time, but more importantly, on all the things that have changed in the backup environment, such as the total capacity under management.

Marc V. Mombourquette, product marketing manager at Acronis (www.acronis.com), says when it comes to bringing a disaster recovery plan up to par, SMEs should ask themselves the following questions: How long can I afford not to have each of the applications I’m responsible for up and running? Does my current disaster recovery plan allow me to meet those recovery time frames? How can I prioritize the resources required to meet my recovery time objectives for each circumstance? Mombourquette comments, “It’s important to identify and isolate an RTO for each application. By establishing RTOs for each IT function, creating recovery programs that allow you to meet them, and then testing them before they’re needed, you’ll be sure of your ability to minimize the impact of a disaster without spending any more money than is necessary.”

Hard To Handle

Handling performance and capacity requirements is important, as well, but Adam Stuflick, technical sales lead at NovaStor, says you must first check to see if you are currently meeting those requirements. “Are your backups—and, more importantly, restores—going quickly enough? When new hardware and new software are introduced into the enterprise, there must be a check of the disaster recovery plan,” Stuflick says. In addition to these questions, Fouarge says enterprises need to ask the following: How does this new item affect the disaster recovery plan? Is the performance still where it needs to be? What sort of headroom does the current infrastructure and software have left in it? What are the risks that the new item puts into the DR plan?

In terms of recovery time objectives, Mombourquette says they are being driven down by the need to keep applications up and running, not just for internal personnel, but for partners and customers who now link deeply into many corporate applications for most of a business day and often around the clock. “With the advent of disk image-based backup and instant recovery, it’s possible to recover a failed server as quickly as an administrator can click a mouse, all without investing in hardware or software solutions priced beyond the budget constraints of small and medium-sized organizations,” he says.

So what about changing requirements? Kramer says an enterprise’s data protection system needs to dynamically address the desired changes in service level objectives for backup and restore windows based on the latest regulatory mandates and new overall strategies in managing the information assets of the organization.

According to Nathan Hillen, operations staff member with NovaStor, with the new options that cloud-based storage is giving end users (be it production storage or archival storage), IT administrators have much more flexibility to develop disaster recovery plans that really cover all facets of their infrastructures. Mombourquette says IT administrators are constantly faced with change, so it makes sense to move to disaster recovery products that adapt fluidly as change presents itself. He concludes, “Such products should allow you to work smarter, reduce IT administration costs, and do everything required to protect your data.”