Time for Change – From Backup to Availability

It’s all about application and site availability Backup is no substitute for site and application availability Henry David Thoreau clarifies our present situation when he said “Men have become the tools of their tools” CIOs, Storage Administrators and IT professionals are constantly challenged by limited time, talent, and budget to adequately deal with their real work issues of data growth, data protection, remote offices, compliance, migrations, disaster recovery, and server failure.  Little time is afforded to ensure their IT applications and data are constantly available.  As a result, organizations end up with several disparate point solutions which make data and application availability during a disaster  very challenging and in most cases impossible to achieve. Over the past twenty years I have been involved with hundreds of storage related projects which include a long list of complex architectures, point solutions, technologies and more acronyms probably second only to the field of medicine. A short list would include something like this:  LAN, WAN,SAN, SWAN, NAS, DAS, SCIS,  iSCSI, FC, Infiniband, LTO, Replication, WAN Optimization, Data De-duplication, Backup, Archive, HSM, ILM, Content Management, Server Clustering, Mirroring, Search, Bare Metal Recovery, High Availability, Co-Stand Servers, Clustered File Systems, HyperVisor, Virtualization, RAID, Continuous Data Protection, and the list goes on.  These words show up in glossaries of IT related books and probably the perfect architecture is imbedded in a Leonardo da Vinci painting. Like most everything, there is more than one way to approach and solve a particular problem. The proper way to approach and solve a company’s particular problem is to first define what the overall business requirement is.  What is the  organization’s  tolerance for downtime  (Recovery Time Objective)? How much data can they afford to lose (Recovery Point Objective) should a failure occur?  The overall business requirement for virtually all businesses should be to ensure that its applications and data are available and if a failure of any kind occurs  it can get its applications and data back online within its RTO.  Budget constraints often dictate and more often than not create a gap between what the business’ service level agreement (SLA) needs to be versus what IT can actually implement. Ask yourself this simple question:  If my site was completely destroyed how this would impact the business? How long would my critical applicationa be unavailable? To put it into real $$… International Data Corp. estimates that companies lose an average of $84,000 for every hour of downtime. According to Strategic Research, the cost of downtime is estimated at close to $90,000 per hour. The true cost of a data protection solution needs to include the costs of downtime. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you are an average company and if it took you 3-5 days to get your IT applications and data accessible, the resulting cost to your company would be in millions, not thousands of dollars.  This doesn’t factor in the loss of customers and reputation. Let’s face it….. A business that cannot access its applications and or data cannot service its customers. The longer their critical applications and or data are not available, the higher the costs incurred and higher  their risk of going out of business. Unfortunately very few companies can afford to take application and site availability into consideration due to the high cost of traditional redundant site architectures. Traditionally  for every dollar spent for production another dollar is spent for a recovery site.  Given the cost and labor to manage such redundant architectures, small to medium enterprises cannot afford to implement traditional solutions, leaving them unprepared to survive even a small disaster. nScaled is here to solve this problem for companies of all sizes. The nScaled Platform is designed to eliminate costly data centers and antiquated backup/recovery technologies by replacing  it all with a powerful SAAS platform that speeds data , server and site recovery,  automates and streamlines processes while reducing cost and complexity.  No more spending money on things like redundant data centers and production environments unless you actually need to use them. It is like having car insurance for your applications and data…you only pay for a claim when you need to.  But you have peace of mind knowing your business is insured in the event of an accident.    BCDR on Demand! Brad Wenzel – VP of Channels nScaled, Inc.