How To Reduce Disaster Recovery Expenses

clear concise consulting
HOW TO REDUCE DISASTER RECOVERY EXPENSES
Best Practices for Virtual Environments

Chris M Evans
Langton Blue Ltd
Copyright 2014 Langton Blue Ltd
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
Chris M Evans
27 years experience in the IT industry across all platforms,
including IBM mainframe, Windows & Open Systems.
Co-founder and independent consultant at Langton Blue
Ltd, a specialist consulting company in the UK.
Blogger and part-time analyst at Architecting.IT
Twitter: @chrismevans, @architectingIT, @langtonblue
Web: www.architecting.it, www.langtonblue.com
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
The business need for BC/DR

Why BC/DR is different from hardware resiliency
Strategies for implementing BC/DR based on application and
business Service Level Objectives
Choosing between storage array, hypervisor and applicationbased recovery solutions
Choosing between VM-level and LUN-level recovery solutions
Technical solutions for BC/DR with virtual servers, including
Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and open source
platforms
Vendor roundup - 3rd Party recovery solutions for virtual
environments
THE NEED FOR BC/DR
BC - Business Continuity; DR Disaster Recovery

Data and IT systems are an increasingly important (and in
many cases critical) part of many organisations business
processes
Customer facing websites

Purchasing systems
ERP (manufacturing, marketing, sales, payments)
Email, VDI
Businesses can afford little or no downtime or service

outages
Recovery is as much about process/people as it is
computer systems
THE NEED FOR BC/DR - STATISTICS
30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business

within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing
Magazine)
31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond
their control.
34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that
do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.
60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6
months of the disaster.
Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States. (Mozy
Online Backup)
Companies that aren't able to resume operations within ten days
(of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive. (Strategic Research
Institute)
THE NEED FOR BC/DR - EXAMPLE
Loss or damage to computer

systems
Fire, power failure, flood,
earthquake
Inability to access facilities

Fire, flood or hazard (chemical,
radiation, gases)
Criminal or Malicious Damage

Disgruntled employees, hackers
System or Application Failure

Software bug, failed upgrades, data
corruption
HARDWARE RESILIENCY IS NOT BC/DR
Hardware resiliency provides for simple localised

hardware failure
Redundant power supplies, multi-pathed storage
connections, redundant network connections, RAID
storage
BC/DR provides systems and processes to continue

business operations in the event of major disasters
Developing a BC/DR strategy means creating
processes for re-instating systems due to loss of
equipment, facilities and staff
RECOVERY REQUIREMENTS SERVICE LEVELS
Some more definitions

RPO Recovery Point Objective the time (in the past) that
systems should be recovered to. Could be 24/48 hours or 0
for critical banking systems
RTO Recovery Time Objective the time taken to re-instate
systems back to the RPO point. Could be as low as 0, but
typically minutes or hours
SLO Service Level Objective a target measure of the
service to be delivered (e.g. 90% of systems restored within 4
hours)
SLA Service Level Agreement a legal agreement, usually
with penalties attached to an SLO (e.g. service credits or
10,000 fine for not restoring within the SLO)
BC/DR STRATEGIES
System recovery costs vary by process

Typically, the closer to RTO=0/RPO=0, the more
expensive the solution
Technical Options DR site
Array-based replication
Hypervisor-based replication
Application-based replication
Technical Options no DR site

Traditional disk/tape backups
RECOVERY STRATEGIES
Non-strategic/scalable solutions
RPO
Backup to Tape
Backup to Disk
Log Shipping
Async with snapshots
Async Replication
Sync Replication
RTO
10
ARRAY-BASED REPLICATION
Supports synch and asynchronous modes (RPO=0)

Scalable entire array or LUN-based replication
Fast (low RTO)
Agentless deployment
X
X
X
X
X
Expensive licences (usually per TB of capacity)

Requires duplicate hardware from same vendor
Not application or hypervisor aware
Low granularity (LUN/volume based)
Complex/impossible to support cloud DR
11
HYPERVISOR-BASED REPLICATION
Supports asynchronous modes

Scalable to many virtual machines
Virtual machine & application aware
Good granularity (the VM), only changed data
Can support cloud models, but not easy
X Licensing is required
X Can require deployment of dedicated VMs to manage
replication data
12
APPLICATION-BASED REPLICATION
Supports asynchronous modes

VM aware (works within the VM)
Application aware (by definition)
Works well with cloud deployments
X Not scalable requires configuration/deployment for
each application
X Licensing is required
X Potentially complex with many sub-applications &
databases
13
LUN OR HYPERVISOR REPLICATION?
Array-based replication moves data at the LUN/volume or file

share level
Entire LUN has to be failed over to remote site/equipment,
all VMs on the LUN must go
Hypervisor replication provides a more granular approach for
replication, unless one LUN per VM is used (not scalable)
LUN level replication can be efficient if primary supports
features like deduplication (and dedupe data is not sent over
the WAN)
Synchronous replication has a direct impact on application
latency, depending on how far apart sites are located
14
BEST PRACTICES SAVING COSTS
Build a tiered DR plan implementing multiple

backup/recovery methods with different RTO/RPO
Assign backup/recovery method based on
application requirements/needs
Understand requirements for infrastructure recovery
before backup recovery (e.g. AD/LDAP, DNS etc)
Prioritise application recovery, including
dependencies
Automate where possible use automation
technologies to handle the recovery process
15
VENDOR ROUNDUP - HYPERVISORS
VMware
vSphere Site Recovery Manager automated
management and recovery of virtual machines using either
array-based or Hypervisor-based replication
vSphere Replication hypervisor based replication of
virtual machines
Microsoft
Hyper-V Replica virtual machine replication, managed
either via the GUI or PowerShell, System Center for
automation
Storage Replica (due in next Windows release)
16
VENDOR ROUNDUP
3RD
PARTY
VM Backup
Zerto BC/DR for Enterprises
Veeam Backup & Replication v7
Data Replication
StarWind Virtual SAN, Asynchronous Replication
Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability 7.0
17
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PRODUCT
RPO = 0, RTO = 0
VMware Fault Tolerance
RPO = 0, RTO 0
Replication, e.g. StarWind, Array-based replication,
VMware Replication, Hyper-V replica
RPO > 0, RTO 0

Snapshots, e.g. Veeam Backup & Replication
RPO > 0, RTO > 0

Backup solutions, e.g. traditional platforms, Netbackup,
Backup Exec, TSM etc.
18

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