Systems Alliance Blog

Two weeks ago we marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I paused to reflect on that day, particularly significant to me as a native New Yorker who lost former colleagues, and commiserated with family and friends who lived there, a day they and I will never forget.

As someone who works with clients to improve their DR posture and capabilities, I was struck by a TechRepublic article written by Bob Eisenhardt, a member of the Aon insurance IT team -- Aon is a global insurance company that was located in the South tower on 9/11. In the article Eisenhardt recounted his experience from that day in the form of DR lessons learned.

It’s safe to say that after such a tragic event, people have been paying more attention to disaster recovery measures. Yet as recent events make clear, at many enterprises there are still some gaps in readiness....Click here to read more.

It’s summer. And with summer comes hot weather, trips to the beach and high electricity bills. Unfortunately, summer also brings hurricanes, heat waves, drought, forest fires, brownouts and other unforeseen challenges that can be threatening to companies all over the world. So, does your organization have a disaster recovery plan in place?

Six ways you can prepare for an unexpected event.

1. Understand the requirements of your operations.  Think about your business and the functions that are critical in terms of their impact on revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and other operational issues. Have a clear view of which functions or sub-functions you must be able to restore in the event of a major catastrophe.
   
2. ...Click here to read more.

The  move toward widespread virtualization is usually accompanied by new systems architecture. This would address load balancing, failover and high availability, and also support WAN-based access for remote offices and workers (e.g., sales people who work from home).   Because it's designed for efficiently replicating data from one site to another, this architecture streamlines disaster recovery.

Why is this? The data in a virtualized environment usually encompasses virtual machines (VMs), a configuration database and user data. The size of this data depends on your environment – whether it’s desktop or server virtualization. Beyond that, other components of the virtualized environment, such as hypervisors and connection brokers can be easily put in place to accommodate the replicated data from the main site to a DR site. 

Other issues you need to consider when replicating data to your DR site include: network bandwidth, size of your data files and deciding if your DR environment will be a hot or cold site.   Your choice of operating systems makes little difference in terms of DR, because the operating system is part of the overall backed-up data that is sent to a DR site.

In a “traditional” client-server environment without virtualization, backups are usually only done for the actual user data (especially if the data is on a network share) and not for operating systems or applications.  And if your end user devices are PCs, backing up individual PC operating system environments, including individual user customization can be daunting if not impossible.  

Even if your IT department keeps a golden image of the applications loaded on end-user PCs, it typically doesn’t include  customizations.  This is where virtualization can definitely help; each user’s environment is a virtual machine which contains all applications and any customizations (assuming the user is using a persistent desktop). 

From the standpoint of server virtualization, a complete back-up of your server VMs should be easier to execute because the VMs will likely reside on some type of centralize storage.  Most storage systems support storage replication which makes this really easy to accomplish for back up proposes.   The replicated data can be easily sent off site via high speed network to a DR site. 

One of the problems I’ve  seen with sending large amounts of data across the network is the time it takes – some sites don’t have the network bandwidth to handle the data.  This is where WAN optimization becomes your friend! WAN  optimization will let you send large amounts of data across potentially long distances by applying compression, de-duplication and data packet optimization features regardless of the transport protocol or latency sensitivity. This boosts WAN performance and reduces costs by optimizing existing bandwidth. Keep in mind different WAN optimization solutions work better with certain types of data, it's important to do your homework – and perhaps a pilot – before you invest in this technology.

Finally, you need to think about how you configure end user systems to access your DR site if your main site goes down or becomes inaccessible to your staff. 

The CDC tells us that H1N1 is accelerating in the general populace in the continental US and that we have an exciting period of “regular” flu activity coming in early 2010.

Check out some interesting tools from the CDC for Influenza Community modeling here: (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/tools/communityflu/).

We are increasingly hearing from clients that they are rethinking their approach to business continuity issues as H1N1  and other factors stress already thinly deployed staff. Anecdotal feedback from our clients over the last several weeks indicates that they are considering these high priority issues:

1. How they can limit the spread of H1N1 through more vigorous monitoring of sniffling staff in the workplace. The “stay home you’re not doing us a favor by coming to work sick” message seems to be getting lots of traction
2. In the event of widespread absences, do you shift ongoing IT production work to other staff or wait it out. Do the increased risks and cost outweigh the benefits if the interruption is short term (7-10 days)?
3. Are existing Business Continuity Plans sufficient to handle ongoing, rolling or recurring interruptions? Most BCPs are focused on dealing with one-time events, either geographically or in specific business units. For the first time, many of our clients are addressing the possibility that interruptions could be rolling across multiple business units over extended periods.
4. How do you quantify preparedness costs with traditional IT ROI models (supplemental contractor or capacity costs if needed). The consensus here seems to be a focus on people and lost productivity costs.

Hopefully you’re feeling great and not sniffling and coughing. If you are, go home! Either way, if you're looking for advice and guidance for tuning or otherwise improving your business continuity plans, please get in touch with my colleague Ed Coram.