Managing the information that drives the enterprise

STORAGE

SEARCHSTORAGE.CO.UK

*essential guide

DISASTER
RECOVERY
With the technologies that
are available to help speed,
simplify and lower the
cost of disaster recovery
protection, your excuses
for not having a plan are
falling away.

inside
How to write a DR plan
Cutting DR costs with virtualisation
Cloud-based DR pros and cons
WAN optimisation opens DR doors
Best practices for small companies

editorial

* antony adshead

Technology
options are
removing
obstacles to
disaster recovery
protection
Server virtualisation and the cloud are
making the task of disaster recovery
protection considerably easier than
in the not-too-distant past and
removing excuses for not doing it.

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DISASTER RECOVERY HAS assumed a heightened profile over

the past few years. So much so that looking back to only five
years ago seems like the Dark Ages from here. It was common
to come across many businesses without disaster recovery
plans or provision. Im sure it still is, but with the mushrooming
of disaster recovery technology in the past few years, theres
no excuse nowadays.
On the one hand, there have been strong push factors
impelling organisations towards effective disaster recovery
planning.
This can take the form of legal and regulatory compliance.
Financial services players, for example, have prescribed levels

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of disaster recovery in place. Regulations such as Basel II,

MiFID and those of the UK Financial Services Authority dictate
the standard of disaster recovery expected, the minimum
distance of secondary sites, etc.
Good business sense is also a driver. Again, in the financial
services sector, for example, the need for rapid failover to a
secondary site is not only driven by regulation but also by
the bottom line. In algorithmic trading, milliseconds are worth
millions every year, and the
financial services company
The good news is
that doesnt resume trading
that there are some
again within seconds of an
very attractive pull
outage will lose money hand
over fist.
factors that make
Damage to reputation and
disaster recovery
future ability to trade are the
potentially easier,
bottom lines that disaster
less costly and less
recovery must protect
of a management
against. There are chilling
statistics about the number
headache than it
of businesses that never
has ever been.
recover from an IT disaster,
and those that dobut too
slowlyare likely to suffer a
hemorrhage of customers and a slower but inexorable death.
But enough of the doom and gloom. While there are compelling push factors driving the need for a sound disaster recovery strategy, the good news is that there are some very
attractive pull factors that make disaster recovery potentially
easier, less costly and less of a management headache than
it has ever been.
First of these is server virtualisation. Once upon a time, an
effective disaster recovery strategy meant that your secondary
IT setup needed to be a carbon copy of your primary data

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centre. This was because applicationsOS, updates, patches

and allwere tied to one physical server.
Server virtualisation broke this link. The hypervisor now sits
between applications and the physical device, and where once
apps and data could be restored only to identical servers, now
bare-metal restore on any device is possible. In fact, mirroring
in real time or near real time can enable failover to the secondary server estate in minutes or seconds.
Now, its true that in even the organisations that are most
advanced in IT terms, not all servers are virtualised. But the
fact that manyprobably a majority in most IT departments
are, will make disaster recovery an easier task, with only a
few servers needing to remain entirely physical. For many
SMBs, however, chances are their entire server estate can be
virtualised and disaster recovery made entirely independent of
specific physical devices.
The cloud takes that theme to further logical conclusions.
The provision of compute and storage facilities remotely by
a service provider has been the buzz phrase in IT for the past
couple of years. Its potentially a game changer in many areas,
not least of which is disaster recovery.
Cloud disaster recovery offers remote resources to which
your replicate data; then, should an outage occur, your companys employees can work from the cloud while your physical
IT facilities are restored. Its early days, but at some point
security and bandwidth permittingthis could be the standard
by which all work.
Having said all that, there is one area of disaster recovery
that hasnt necessarily gotten any easier. And that is the need
to analyse risk, develop detailed plans, and test and train and
continuously update them. In this Essential Guide, you will
find pointers towards achieving these tasks. 2
Antony Adshead is bureau chief of SearchStorage.co.UK.

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How to write a
disaster recovery
plan and define
disaster recovery
strategies
Learn how to develop disaster recovery strategies as well as how to write a disaster recovery
plan with these step-by-step instructions.
BY PAUL KIRVAN

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FORMULATING A DETAILED recovery plan is the main aim

of the entire IT disaster recovery planning project. It is

in these plans that you will set out the detailed steps
needed to recover your IT systems to a state in which
they can support the business after a disaster.
But before you can generate that detailed recovery
plan, youll need to perform a risk assessment (RA) and/or
business impact analysis (BIA) to identify the IT services
that support the organisations critical business activities.
Then, youll need to establish recovery time objectives
(RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
Once this work is out of the way, youre ready to move
on to developing disaster recovery strategies, followed
by the actual plans. Here well explain how to write a
disaster recovery plan as well as how to develop disaster
recovery strategies.
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DEVELOPING DR STRATEGIES
Regarding disaster recovery strategies, ISO/IEC 27031, the
global standard for IT disaster recovery, states, Strategies
should define the approaches to implement the required
resilience so that the principles of incident prevention, detection, response, recovery and restoration are put in place.
Strategies define what you plan to do when responding to
an incident, while plans describe how you will do it.
Once you have identified your critical systems, RTOs, RPOs,
etc, create a table, as shown below, to help you formulate the
disaster recovery strategies you will use to protect them.
Youll want to consider issues such as budgets, managements position with regard to risks, the availability of re-

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Table 1: Determining DR strategies

Prevention
strategy

Response
strategy

Recovery
strategy

Server
failure

Secure
equipment
room and
backup
server;
install UPS

Switch over
to backup
server;
validate
that UPS
is running

Fix/replace
primary
server; fail
back to
primary
server

8/4

Loss of
manufacturing
systems

Set up
failure
alerts and
conduct
regular inspections;
install UPS

Run manufacturing
on alternate
system

Fix primary
manufacturing
system;
return to
normal
operations

2/2

Locate
Security
system in
system
destroyed secure
area; install
protective
enclosures
around
sensor
units;
install UPS

Deploy
guards at
strategic
points

Obtain/
install
replacement
unit(s),
sensor(s)

Critical
system

RTO/RPO
(in hours)

Accounts
payable

4/2

Manufacturing

Building
security

Threat

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sources, costs versus benefits, human constraints, technological constraints and regulatory obligations.
Lets examine some additional factors in strategy definition.
People. This involves availability of staff/contractors, training

needs of staff/contractors, duplication of critical skills so

there can be a primary and at least one backup person, available documentation to be used by staff, and follow-up to
ensure staff and contractor retention of knowledge.
Physical facilities. Areas to look at are availability of alter-

nate work areas within the same site, at a different company

location, at a third-party-provided location, at employees
homes or at a transportable work facility. Then consider site
security, staff access procedures, ID badges and the location
of the alternate space relative to the primary site.
Technology. Youll need to consider access to equipment

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space that is properly configured for IT systems, with raised

floors, for example; suitable heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) for IT systems; sufficient primary electrical
power; suitable voice and data infrastructure; the distance of
the alternate technology area from the primary site; provision
for staffing at an alternate technology site; availability of
failover (to a backup system) and failback (return to normal
operations) technologies to facilitate recovery; support for
legacy systems; and physical and information security capabilities at the alternate site.
Data. Areas to look at include timely backup of critical

data to a secure storage area in accordance with RTO/RPO

requirements, method(s) of data storage (disk, tape, optical,
etc), connectivity and bandwidth requirements to ensure all
critical data can be backed up in accordance with RTO/RPO
time scales, data protection capabilities at the alternate
storage site, and availability of technical support from
qualified third-party service providers.

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Suppliers. Youll need to identify and contract with primary

and alternate suppliers for all critical systems and processes,

and even the sourcing of people. Key areas where alternate
suppliers will be important include hardware (such as servers,
racks, etc), power (such as batteries, universal power supplies,
power protection, etc), networks (voice and data network
services), repair and replacement of components, and multiple delivery firms (FedEx, UPS, etc).
Policies and procedures. Define policies for IT disaster re-

covery and have them approved by senior management. Then

define step-by-step procedures to, for example, initiate data
backup to secure alternate locations, relocate operations to
an alternate space, recover systems and data at the alternate
sites, and resume operations at either the original site or at a
new location.

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Finally, be sure to obtain management sign-off for your

strategies. Be prepared to demonstrate that your strategies
align with the organisations business goals and business
continuity strategies.

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TRANSLATING DISASTER RECOVERY STRATEGIES INTO DR PLANS

Once your disaster recovery strategies have been developed,
youre ready to translate them into disaster recovery plans.
Lets take Table 1 and recast it into Table 2, on p. 9. Here we
can see the critical system and associated threat, the response strategy and (new) response action steps, as well as
the recovery strategy and (new) recovery action steps. This
approach can help you quickly drill down and define high-level
action steps.
From Table 2 you can expand the high-level steps into more
detailed step-by-step procedures, as you deem necessary. Be
sure they are linked in the proper sequence.

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Table 2: Using strategies to create plan

Response
strategy

Response
action steps

Recovery
strategy

Recovery
action steps

Server
failure

Switch over
to backup
server;
validate
that UPS
is running

Verify server
is down;
verify data
has been
backed
up and is
safe; test
backup
server; start
switchover
to alternate
server

Fix/replace
primary
server; fail
back to
primary
server

Verify cause
of server
outage;
obtain, test
and install
new server;
fail systems
back to new
server

Manufacturing

Loss of
manufacturing systems

Run manufacturing on
alternate
system

Verify manufacturing
system is
down; verify
data has
been backed
up and is
safe; test
alternate
system;
start
switchover
to alternate
manufacturing system

Fix primary
manufacturing system;
return to
normal
operations

Verify cause
of manufacturing system outage;
contact
repair resources;
fix and test
manufacturing system;
fail manufacturing
system back
to repaired
system

Building
security

Security
system
destroyed

Deploy
guards at
strategic
points

Verify security system

is down; verify security
data has
been backed
up and is
safe; contact
guard agencies to
source onsite guards;
define guard
duties; brief
guards on
duties; provide communications
devices for
guards

Obtain/
install
replacement
unit(s),
sensor(s)

Verify cause
of security
system outage; contact
supplier to
get replacement; test
replacement
system;
restart
security
system

Critical
system

Threat

Accounts
payable

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DEVELOPING DR PLANS
DR plans provide a step-by-step process for responding to a
disruptive event. Procedures should ensure an easy-to-use
and repeatable process for recovering damaged IT assets
and returning them to normal operation as quickly as possible.
If staff relocation to a third-party hot site or other alternate
space is necessary, procedures must be developed for those
activities.
When developing your IT DR plans, be sure to review the
global standards ISO/IEC 24762 for disaster recovery and
ISO/IEC 27035 (formerly ISO 18044) for incident response
activities.

INCIDENT RESPONSE

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In addition to using the strategies previously developed, IT

disaster recovery plans should form part of an incident response process that addresses the initial stages of the incident and the steps to be taken. This process can be seen as
a timeline, such as in Disaster timeline (below), in which
incident response actions precede disaster recovery actions.

Writing the
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Cloud DR

THE DR PLAN STRUCTURE

The following section details the elements in a DR plan in the
sequence defined by ISO 27031 and ISO 24762.

WAN
optmisation

Disaster timeline

SMB best
practices

Incident
management

Emergency
management

Disaster
recovery

Business
continuity

Time
Note: We have included emergency management, as it represents activities that
may be needed to address situations where humans are injured or situations such
as fires that must be addressed by local fire brigades and other first responders.

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Important: Best-in-class DR plans should begin with a few

pages that summarise key action steps (such as where to
assemble employees if forced to evacuate the building) and
lists of key contacts and their contact information for ease
of authorising and launching the plan.
1. Introduction. Following the initial emergency pages,

DR plans have an introduction that includes the purpose

and scope of the plan. This section should specify who has
approved the plan, who is authorised to activate it and a list
of linkages to other relevant plans and documents.
2. Roles and responsibilities. The next section should define

roles and responsibilities of DR recovery team members, their

contact details, spending limits (for example, if equipment
has to be purchased) and the limits of their authority in a
disaster situation.

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11

3. Incident response. During the incident response process,

we typically become aware of an out-of-normal situation

(such as being alerted by various system-level alarms), quickly
assess the situation (and any damage) to make an early determination of its severity, attempt to contain the incident
and bring it under control, and notify management and other
key stakeholders.
4. Plan activation. Based on the findings from incident

response activities, the next step is to determine if disaster

recovery plans should be launched, and which ones in particular should be invoked. If DR plans are to be invoked, incident
response activities can be scaled back or terminated, depending on the incident, allowing for launch of the DR plans.
This section defines the criteria for launching the plan, what
data is needed and who makes the determination. Included
within this part of the plan should be assembly areas for
staff (primary and alternates), procedures for notifying and
activating DR team members, and procedures for standing

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down the plan if management determines the DR plan response is not needed.
5. Document history. A section on plan document dates

and revisions is essential and should include dates of revisions, what was revised and who approved the revisions.
This can be located at the front of the plan document.
6. Procedures. Once the plan has been launched, DR teams

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take the materials assigned to them and proceed with response and recovery activities as specified in the plans. The
more detailed the plan is, the more likely the affected IT asset will be recovered and returned to normal operation. Technology DR plans can be enhanced with relevant recovery information and procedures obtained from system vendors.
Check with your vendors while developing your DR plans to
see what they have in terms of emergency recovery documentation.
7. Appendixes. Located at the end of the plan, these can

include systems inventories, application inventories, network

asset inventories, contracts and service-level agreements,
supplier contact data, and any additional documentation that
will facilitate recovery.

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FURTHER ACTIVITIES

WAN
optmisation

Once your DR plans have been completed, they are ready to

be exercised. This process will determine whether they will
recover and restore IT assets as planned.
In parallel to these activities are three additional ones:
creating employee awareness, training and records management. These are essential in that they ensure employees are
fully aware of DR plans and their responsibilities in a disaster,
and DR team members have been trained in their roles and
responsibilities as defined in the plans. And since DR planning
generates a significant amount of documentation, records

SMB best
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management (and change management) activities should

also be initiated. If your organisation already has records
management and change management programmes, use
them in your DR planning. 2
Paul Kirvan, CISA, FBCVI, CBCP, has more than 20 years of experience in
business continuity management as a consultant, author and educator.

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Virtual disaster
recovery
Storage and server virtualisation make
many of the most onerous disaster recovery
tasks relatively easy to execute, while
helping to cut overall DR costs.
BY LAUREN WHITEHOUSE

IF YOUR COMPANY still lacks a viable disaster recovery

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14

(DR) strategy, it might be time to start thinking virtualisation. The initial drivers behind server virtualisation adoption have been improving resource utilisation and lowering costs through consolidation, but next-wave adopters
have realised that virtualisation can also improve availability.
Virtualisation turns physical devices into sets of resource pools that are independent of the physical assets
they run on. With server virtualisation, decoupling operating systems, applications and data from specific
physical assets eliminates the economic and operational
issues of infrastructure silosone of the key ingredients
to affordable disaster recovery.
Storage virtualisation takes those very same benefits
and extends them from servers to the underlying storage
domain, bringing IT organisations one step closer to the
ideal of a virtualised IT infrastructure. By harnessing the
power of virtualisation, at both the server and storage
level, IT organisations can become more agile in disaster
recovery.
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REDUCE THE RISK

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Improving disaster recovery and business continuity are

perennial top-10 IT priorities because companies want to
reduce the risk of losing access to systems and data. While
most shops have daily data protection plans in place, fewer
of them focus their efforts on true disasters, which would
include any event that interrupts service at the primary
production location. An event can be one of many different
things, including power failures, fires, floods, other weatherrelated outages, natural disasters, pandemics or terrorism.
Regardless of the cause, unplanned downtime in the data
centre can wreak havoc on ITs ability to maintain business
operations.
The goal of a DR process is to re-create all necessary systems at a second location as quickly and reliably as possible.
Unfortunately, for many firms, DR strategies are often cobbled together because theres nothing or no one mandating
them, theyre too costly or complex, or theres a false belief
that existing backup processes are adequate for disaster
recovery.
Backup technologies and processes will take you only so
far when it comes to a disaster. Tier 1 data (the most critical
stuff) makes up approximately 50% of an organisations total
primary data. When the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed IT professionals responsible for data protection, 53%
said their organisation could tolerate one hour or less of
downtime before their business suffered revenue loss or
some other type of adverse business impact; nearly threequarters (74%) fell into the less-than-three-hour range. (The
results of this survey were published in the ESG research
report, 2010 Data Protection Trends, April 2010.) When relying
on backup for DR, under the best conditions, the time it takes
to acquire replacement hardware, reinstall operating systems
and applications, and recover dataeven from a disk-based

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copywill likely exceed a recovery time objective (RTO) of one

to three hours.
Recovery from a mirror copy of a system is faster than recovering with traditional backup methods, but its also more
expensive and complex. Maintaining identical systems in two
locations and synchronising configuration settings and data
copies can be a challenge. This often forces companies to
prioritise or triage their data, providing greater protection
to some tiers than others. ESG research found that Tier 2 data
comprises 28% of all primary data, and nearly half (47%) of
IT organisations we surveyed noted three hours or less of
downtime tolerance for Tier 2 data. Therefore, if costs force
a company to apply a different strategy or a no-protection
strategy for critical (Tier 1) vs. important (Tier 2), some
risks may be introduced.

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16

BENEFITS OF SERVER VIRTUALISATION FOR DR

Virtualisation has become a major catalyst for change in
x86 environments because it provides new opportunities for
more cost-effective DR. When looking at the reasons behind
server virtualisation initiatives on the horizon, ESG research
found that making use of virtual machine replication to facilitate disaster recovery ranked second behind consolidating
more physical servers onto virtualisation platforms. (See the
ESG research report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions, published
in January 2011, for details of the survey results.)
Because server virtualisation abstracts from the physical
hardware layer, it eliminates the need for identical hardware
configurations at production and recovery data centres,
which provides several benefits. And since virtualisation is
often a catalyst to refresh the underlying infrastructure,
theres usually retired hardware on hand. For some organisations that might not have been able to secure the CapEx to

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17

outfit a DR configuration, there may be an opportunity to take

advantage of hand-me-down hardware. Also, by consolidating
multiple applications on a single physical server at the recovery data centre, the amount of physical recovery infrastructure required is reduced. This, in turn, minimises expensive
raised floor space costs, as well as additional power and
cooling requirements.
Leveraging the encapsulation and portability features
Leveraging the
of virtual servers aids in DR
encapsulation
enablement. Encapsulating
and portability
the virtual machine into a
features of virtual
single file enables mobility
servers aids in
and allows multiple copies
of the virtual machine to be
DR enablement.
created and more easily
transferred within and between sites for business
resilience and DR purposesa dramatic improvement over
backing up data to portable media such as tape and rotating
media at a cold standby site. In addition, protecting virtual
machine images and capturing the system state of the virtual
machine are new concepts that werent available in the physical world. In a recovery situation, theres no need to reassemble the operating system, reset configuration settings and restore data. Activating a virtual machine image is a lot faster
than starting from a bare-metal recovery.
Flexibility is another difference. Virtualisation eliminates
the aforementioned need for a one-to-one physical mirror of
a system for disaster recovery. IT has the choice of establishing physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) failover
configurationslocally and/or remotelyto enable rapid recovery without incurring the additional expense of purchasing
and maintaining identical hardware. Virtualisation also offers

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flexibility in configuring active-active scenarios (for example,

a remote or branch office acts as the recovery site for the
production site and vice versa) or active-passive (for example,
a corporate-owned or third-party hosting site acts as the recovery site, remaining dormant until needed).
Finally, virtualisation delivers flexibility in the form of DR
testing. To fully test a disaster recovery plan requires disabling
the primary data centre and attempting to fail over to the secondary. A virtualised infrastructure makes it significantly easier
to conduct frequent non-disruptive tests to ensure the DR
process is correct and the
organisations staff is pracWith server virtualiticed in executing it consissation, a greater
tently and correctly, includdegree of DR agility
ing during peak hours of
operation.
can be achieved.
With server virtualisation,
a greater degree of DR agility
can be achieved. ITs ability
to respond to service interruptions can be greatly improved,
especially with new automation techniques, such as those
available for VMware virtualisation technology and Microsoft
System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which offers tools to
determine which applications and services to restore in
which order. Recovery can be quicker and the skills required
by operations staff to recover virtualised applications are less
stringent.

USING STORAGE VIRTUALISATION IN A DR PLAN

As organisations become more comfortable with one form
of virtualisation, they dont have to make great intellectual or
operational leaps to grasp the concept of virtualising other
data centre domains. Often, IT organisations undertaking

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19

complete data centre refresh initiatives position virtualisation

as a key part of the makeover and look to extract all possible
efficiencies in one fell swoop by deploying virtualisation in
multiple technology areas. So its not uncommon to see server
virtualisation combined with storage virtualisation.
Like server virtualisation, storage virtualisation untethers
data from dedicated devices. Storage virtualisation takes
multiple storage systems and treats those devices as a single,
centrally managed pool of storage, enabling management
from one console. It also enables data movement among
different storage systems transparently, providing capacity
and load balancing. In addition to lowering costs, imIn a DR scenario,
proving resource utilisation,
increasing availability, simstorage virtualisaplifying upgrades and ention improves
abling scalability, the exresource utilisation,
pected benefit of storage
allowing organisavirtualisation is easier and
tions to do more
more cost-effective DR.
In a DR scenario, storage
with less capacity
virtualisation improves reon hand.
source utilisation, allowing
organisations to do more
with less capacity on hand.
IT is likely to purchase and deploy far less physical storage
with thin, just-in-time provisioning of multiple tiers of storage.
By improving capacity utilisation, organisations can reduce
the amount of additional capacity purchases and more easily
scale environments.
Virtualisation allows storage configurations to vary between the primary and the DR site. Flexibility in configuring
dissimilar systems at the production and recovery sites can
introduce cost savings (by allowing existing storage systems

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to be reclaimed and reused), without introducing complexity.

It also allows IT to mirror primary storage to more affordable
solutions at a remote site, if desired.
Native data replication that integrates with the virtualised
storage environment can provide improved functionality for
virtual disaster recovery. Remote mirroring between heterogeneous storage systems (that is, more expensive at the primary site and less costly at the recovery site) contributes to
lower costs.

FINAL WORD ON VIRTUALISATION

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Virtual DR

Whether used singly or combined, server virtualisation and

storage virtualisation are making an impact on ITs ability to
deliver DR and to deliver it cost effectively. If your company
has been on the sidelines, crossing its collective fingers and
hoping a disaster never strikes, it might be time to investigate
virtualisation. And if you have virtualisation in place, you
should have the basic elements for an effective and costefficient DR environment. Its time to take the next steps. 2
Lauren Whitehouse is a senior analyst focusing on backup and recovery software
and replication solutions at Enterprise Strategy Group.

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Blueprint for
cloud-based
disaster recovery
Cloud storage and computing services offer
a number of alternatives for cloud-based DR
depending on the recovery time and recovery
point objectives a company requires.
BY JACOB GSOEDL

CLOUD COMPUTING, along with mobile and tablet devices,

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accounts for much of the high-tech buzz these days. But

when it comes to hype, the cloud seems to absorb more
than its fair share, which has had the unintended consequence of sometimes overshadowing its real utility.
Although the conceptand some of the products and
servicesof cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) is still
nascent, some companies, especially smaller organisations, are discovering and starting to leverage cloud
services for DR.
It can be an attractive alternative for companies that
may be strapped for IT resources because the usage-based
cost of cloud services is well suited for DR where the secondary infrastructure is parked and idling most of the time.
Having DR sites in the cloud reduces the need for data
centre space, IT infrastructure and IT resources, which
leads to significant cost reductions, enabling smaller
companies to deploy disaster recovery options that were
previously only found in larger enterprises. Cloud-based
DR moves the discussion from data centre space and
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hardware to one about cloud capacity planning, said Lauren

Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
But cloud-based disaster recovery isnt a perfect solution,
and its shortcomings and challenges need to be clearly understood before a firm ventures into it. Security usually tops the
list of concerns. Questions to consider:

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Virtual DR

Is data securely transferred and stored in the cloud?

How are users authenticated?

Are passwords the only option or does the cloud provider

offer some type of two-factor authentication?

Does the cloud provider meet regulatory requirements?

And because clouds are accessed via the Internet, bandwidth requirements also need to be clearly understood.
Theres a risk of only planning for bandwidth requirements to
move data into the cloud without sufficient analysis of how
to make the data accessible when a disaster strikes. Questions to consider:

Do you have the bandwidth and network capacity to

redirect all users to the cloud?

If you plan to restore from the cloud to on-premises

infrastructure, how long will that restore take?

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22

If you use cloud-based backups as part of your DR, you

need to design your backup sets for recovery, said Chander
Kant, CEO and founder at Zmanda, an open-source backup
app vendor.
Reliability of the cloud provider, its availability and its ability
to serve your users while a disaster is in progress are other
key considerations. The choice of a cloud service provider or
managed service provider (MSP) that can deliver service within the agreed terms is essential, and while making a wrong
choice may not land you in IT hell, it can easily put you in the
doghouse or even get you fired.
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DEVISING A DISASTER RECOVERY BLUEPRINT

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Just as with traditional DR, there isnt a single blueprint for

cloud-based disaster recovery. Every company is unique in
the applications it runs and the relevance of the applications
to its business and the industry its in. Therefore, a cloud disaster recovery plan (aka cloud DR blueprint) is very specific
and distinctive for each organisation.
Triage is the overarching principle used to derive traditional
as well as cloud-based DR plans. The process of devising a
DR plan starts with identifying and prioritising applications,
services and data, and determining for each one the amount
of downtime thats acceptable before theres a significant
business impact. Priority
and required recovery time
objectives (RTOs) will then
Triage is the overardetermine the disaster
ching principle used
recovery approach.
to derive traditional
Identifying critical reas well as cloudsources and recovery methbased DR plans.
ods is the most relevant
aspect during this process,
since you need to ensure
that all critical apps and
data are included in your blueprint. By the same token, to
control costs and to ensure speedy and focused recovery
when the plan needs to be executed, you want to make sure
to leave out irrelevant applications and data. The more focused
a DR plan is, the more likely youll be able to test it periodically
and execute it within the defined objectives.
With applications identified and prioritised and RTOs defined,
you can then determine the best and most cost-effective
methods of achieving the RTOs, which needs to be done by
application and service. In the rarest of cases, youll have a
single DR method for all your applications and data; more

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likely youll end up with several methods that protect clusters

of applications and data with similar RTOs. A combination of
cost and recovery objectives drive different levels of disaster
recovery, said Seth Goodling, virtualisation practice manager
at backup app vendor Acronis.

CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY OPTIONS

Managed applications and managed DR. An increasingly popular

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24

option is to put both primary production and disaster recovery

instances into the cloud and
have both handled by an
MSP. By doing this youre
The relevance of
reaping all the benefits
service-level agreeof cloud computing, from
ments with a cloud
usage-based cost to elimiprovider cannot be
nating on-premises infraoverstated; with
structure. Instead of doing
it yourself, youre deferring
SLAs youre negotiDR to the cloud or MSP. The
ating access to your
choice of service provider
applications.
and the process of negotiatGREG SCHULZ, founder and
ing appropriate service-level
senior analyst, StorageIO Group
agreements (SLAs) are of
utmost importance. By
handing over control to the
service provider, you need to be absolutely certain its able
to deliver uninterrupted service within the defined SLAs for
both primary and DR instances. The relevance of service-level
agreements with a cloud provider cannot be overstated; with
SLAs youre negotiating access to your applications, said Greg
Schulz, founder and senior analyst at the StorageIO Group.
A pure cloud play is becoming increasingly popular for
email and some other business applications, such as customer

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relationship management (CRM), where Salesforce.com has

been a pioneer and is now leading the cloud-based CRM market.
Back up to and restore from the cloud. Applications and data

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25

remain on-premises in this approach, with data being backed

up into the cloud and restored onto on-premises hardware
when a disaster occurs. In other words, the backup in the
cloud becomes a substitute for tape-based off-site backups.
When contemplating cloud-based backup and restore, its
crucial to clearly understand both the backup and the more
problematic restore aspects. Backing up into the cloud is
relatively straightforward,
and backup application vendors have been extending
Our cloud connector
their backup suites with
moves data deduped,
options to directly back up
compressed and
to popular cloud service
encrypted into the
providers such as AT&T,
cloud and allows
Amazon, Microsoft, Nirvanix
setting retention
and Rackspace.
Our cloud connector
times of data in
moves data deduped, comthe cloud.
pressed and encrypted into
DAVID NGO, director of engineering
the cloud and allows setting
alliances, CommVault Systems
retention times of data in the
cloud, said David Ngo, director of engineering alliances
at CommVault Systems, who aptly summarised features you
should look for in products that move data into the cloud.
Likewise, cloud gateways, such as the F5 ARX Cloud Extender, Nasuni Filer, Riverbed Whitewater and TwinStrata
CloudArray, can be used to move data into the cloud. They
straddle on-premises and cloud storage and keep both
on-premises data and data in the cloud in sync.
The challenging aspect of using cloud-based backups for

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disaster recovery is the recovery. With bandwidth limited and

possibly terabytes of data to be recovered, getting data restored back on-premises within defined RTOs can be challenging. Some cloud backup service providers offer an option to
restore data to disks, which are then sent to the customer
for local on-premises recovery. Another option is a large onpremises cache of recent backups that can be used for local
restores.
I firmly believe that backups need to be local and from
there sent into the cloud; in other words, the backup in the
cloud becomes your secondary off-site backup, said Jim
Avazpour, president at OS33s infrastructure division.
On the other hand, depending on the data to be restored,

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Cloud-based DR approaches side-by-side

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Managed primary
and DR instances
Salesforce.com
CRM
Email in the cloud

On-premises
into the cloud
Cloud to cloud

On-premises into
the cloud
Cloud to cloud

Merits

Fully managed DR
100% usage based
Least complex

Only requires
cloud storage;
cloud virtual
machines are
optional
Usually less
complex than
replication

Best recovery
time objectives
(RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
More likely to
support application-consistent
recovery

Caution

Service-level agreements define access

to production and
DR instances

Less favorable
RTOs and RPOs
than replication

Higher degree
of complexity

Implemented
via . . .

N/A

Backup applications
and appliances

Replication
software
Cloud gateways
Cloud storage
software such
as EMC Atmos
and Hitachi HCP

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Replication
in the cloud

Instances
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Cloud-based
backup and restore

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features like compression and, more importantly, data dedupe

can make restores from data in the cloud to on-premises infrastructure a viable option.
Back up to and restore to the cloud. In this approach, data

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isnt restored back to on-premises infrastructure; instead, its

restored to virtual machines in the cloud. This requires both
cloud storage and cloud compute resources, such as Amazons
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The restore can be done when
a disaster is declared or on a continuous basis (pre-staged).
Pre-staging DR VMs and keeping them relatively up-to-date
through scheduled restores is crucial in cases where aggressive RTOs need to be met. Some cloud service providers facilitate bringing up cloud virtual machines as part of their DR
offering. Several cloud service providers use our products for
secure deduped replication and to bring servers up virtually
in the cloud, said Chris Poelker, vice president of enterprise
solutions at FalconStor Software.
Replication to virtual machines in the cloud. For applications

that require aggressive RTOs and recovery point objectives

(RPOs), as well as application awareness, replication is the
data movement option of choice. Replication to cloud virtual
machines can be used to protect both cloud and on-premises
production instances.
In other words, replication is suitable for both cloud-VMto-cloud-VM and on-premises-to-cloud-VM data protection.
Replication products are based on continuous data protection (CDP), such as with CommVault Continuous Data Replicator, snapshots or object-based cloud storage such as with
EMC Atmos or the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). Cloud
service provider Peak Web Hosting enables on-premises HCP
instances to replicate to a Peak Web HCP instance instead
of another on-premises HCP instance, said Robert Primmer,
senior technologist and senior director content services,
Hitachi Data Systems.
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NEW OPTIONS, OLD FUNDAMENTALS

The cloud greatly extends disaster recovery options, yields
significant cost savings and enables DR methods in smalland medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that were previously
only possible in larger organisations. It does not, however,
change the DR fundamentals of having to devise a solid disaster recovery plan, testing it periodically and having users
trained and prepared appropriately. 2
Jacob Gsoedl is a freelance writer and a corporate director for business systems.
He can be reached at [email protected].

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Unshackling disaster
recovery with WAN
optimisation products
WAN optimisation can have a huge impact on
data movement processes, especially for disaster
recovery (DR). Learn about WAN optimisation
products specifically aimed at improving DR,
and what you need to have in place before
you deploy WAN optimisation. BY JEFF BOLES

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TRADITIONAL DR HAS often revolved around tape just

because DR has required so much data to be moved. But

WAN optimisation can mean the difference between DR
over the wire being possible or not, and in the age of the
cloud, theres an over-the-wire data movement choice
for nearly any system you can think of. This is proving
a panacea to the more than 85% of organisations that
have too much of their data unprotected in the face of
a potential disaster.
In contrast with tape-based practices, DR over the
wire is easier and requires less expense in manpower,
transportation and physical media. Moving data over the
wire also yields much better recovery points and recovery times than tape. Moreover, DR over the wire reduces
the possibility of media errors or lost shipments that can
often make tape the biggest question mark in a DR plan,
and nearly impossible to test with enough rigour. For upto-the-moment recovery, or avoiding the loss of a day or
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more of data, over-the-wire DR may be the only way to go.

Certainly, achieving over-the-wire DR takes some serious
technologies in the data centre. Identifying and moving the
right data and executing application failovers are not simple
tasks and require either significant manual support or good
integration of tools like VMwares vCenter Site Recovery Manager or agent-based technologies such as Vision Solutions
Double-Take software. But the technology that may make or
break over-the-wire DR may well be WAN optimisation.
Why is this? When Taneja
Group examined WAN optimisation vendors claims
The technology that
around what they can do
may make or break
with transmitted traffic, the
over-the-wire DR
cutting-edge vendors lay
may well be WAN
claim to serious transmitted
optimisation.
data reduction (often as
much as 95%) and lowered
latency from the way they
reduce traffic chattiness
over the wire. Those two factors can create a magnitude of
differences in how up-to-date your data is and how quickly
you can be ready to spin up the environment in the event of a
disaster. Moreover, WAN optimisation products can open the
doors on where and how you do DR and can make it practical
to provision a DR location nearly anywherefrom your own
facility where you dont want to pay for a high-speed private
line, to the numerous service providers that are coming to
market with cloud disaster recovery offerings.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A WAN OPTIMISATION PRODUCT

With an eye towards drastically reducing DR data transmission and achieving these speed and ease-of-use benefits of

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DR over the wire, heres a short list of what you should look
for in a WAN optimisation product:

Designed for DR data: Ask your vendor about its creden-

tials for optimising your DR data stream, with an eye on the

tool sets that you are using to move your DR data. There may
be a world of difference between moving file data and moving
the bits on the wire that make up EMCs SRDF. Either examine,
or take a guess at, what your data footprint will be over the
wire, and the priority of that different traffic. Then evaluate
how well a given vendor can optimise your mission-critical
data alongside your less important data. Moreover, if your
mission-critical data is something very specific, like EMCs
SRDF, then make sure your vendor has EMCs blessing and
is a supported solution.

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Designed for your DR site: Make sure your vendors prod-

uct can be integrated into your DR site. If it is privately owned

and operated, this may be easy, but many solutions built today are carrying data to a service provider or a hosted facility
of some type, even if those facilities are from a provider like
Iron Mountain or SunGard. Optimisation at two ends of the
wire will be many times better than optimisation at only one
end of the wire.

Designed for the right workloads: Make sure your vendor

of choice has a portfolio of products that can be applied to

where your DR data movement needs are today and where
they might be tomorrow. With the idea of the cloud rapidly
shifting how businesses are thinking about IT, your workloads might move or be very different than anticipated when
tomorrow arrives.

Designed to give you control: Finally, with a solution de-

signed to work in the network, you should expect that WAN

optimisation products can provide control of that network.
The age of the cloud will create rapidly changing utilisation

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patterns that can cause interference with mission-critical

workloads like DR. The right insight, along with sufficient control, can mean the difference between keeping your solution
optimised under these rapidly changing demands, or running
into issues that you cant address with anything short of a
forklift upgrade. WAN optimisation devices are ideally placed
to provide visibility into the network and are ideally equipped
to shape network use.

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With your eye on this short list, you can turn to examining
the vendors on the market today, a few of which include Blue
Coat Systems, Certeon, Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, F5
Networks, Riverbed Technology and Silver Peak Systems.
Obviously, on top of these products, you must still have
data replication, tools for coordinating what happens in the
event of a disaster and, most important of all, processes and
technologies for testing your plan and making sure your plan
stays in step with the perpetual changes occurring in any IT
environment. But with WAN optimisation in tow, you can
finally put some of those technologies to work in pursuit of
real business continuity. 2
Jeff Boles is a senior analyst and the director of Taneja Groups hands-on Technology
Validation Services, focused on validating vendor solutions in real-world use cases.
Jeffs background also includes more than 20 years of senior management and
hands-on infrastructure engineering in the trenches of operational IT.

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SMB disaster
recovery best
practices
This technical tip outlines the essentials of
disaster recovery and business continuity
planning for SMBs. Learn about best practices
for SMB DR planning and the basic steps that
are required to put an effective disaster
recovery plan in place. BY PIERRE DORION

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DISASTER RECOVERY isnt always easy, but following some key

disaster recovery best practices is a good start.

It is possible for IT managers at SMBs to feel that they can
easily recover from an outage because they have smaller IT
environments and employ smart IT people. Conversely, there
are instances where managers dont know how to build a
disaster recovery strategy. In either case, this often leads
to no disaster recovery planning at all. If an SMB intends to
build a DR plan, it needs to follow the essentials for disaster
recovery planning.

SMB best
practices

DETERMINING IMPACT
The most importantand difficultstep in disaster recovery
planning is to understand how an unplanned outage would
affect an organisation. This step is referred to as a business
impact analysis (BIA). Without the ability to determine the
impact of an unplanned outage in a meaningful way, it be33

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comes very difficult to determine the type of disaster recovery strategy is needed.
An unplanned outage refers to any unforeseen event that
interrupts normal business activity for a period of time, such
as an IT systems failure, fire, power outage or a natural disaster. Depending on the nature of the interruption, this can
cause an organisation to lose revenue, have problems with
customer satisfaction, lose opportunities or possibly go out
of business.
That impact is determined by identifying the most critical
business activities or functions, and then predicting what
would happen if those processes stopped. This is where
many inexperienced planners make a mistake: They are
tempted to skip a few steps and go to solution mode.
DR planners should not assume there is a workaround or
contingency available when a highly critical function goes
offline.
The intention is to set a recovery time objective (RTO),
which refers to how long can a process be down, and a
recovery point objective (RPO), which refers to how much
data can be lost, for critical functions and IT infrastructure.
Businesses must determine:
A financial value for a critical function, based on how
much money is lost when the revenue stream is interrupted. An
organisations accountant can usually help with this process.
1.

2. How critical each function is for the organisation, based

on how a function affects the revenue stream using a rating

systemfor example, one to five, where one is the most critical and five the least critical
3. How long a business function can be interrupted before

it starts affecting revenue stream

4. How much client or business transaction information can

be lost or re-created without seriously affecting the business

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5. The IT infrastructure and systems upon which the busi-

ness functions depend

UNDERSTANDING RISK

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The next step is the risk assessment, which complements the

impact analysis. The impact of an outage and the anticipated
risk that may exist will indicate the need to develop a recovery strategy.
Assessing risk is another area where planners can get
bogged down. Do not attempt to calculate risk on the chance
it could happen, or try to calculate annualised loss expectancy (which are both complex tasks). Keep it simple and be realistic about the kinds of risks your organisation could face, including specific threats tied to an organisations geographic
location. A risk exists for an organisation if theres nothing in
place to maintain or quickly recover a critical function.
On the other hand, if a system identified as critical is found
to have adequate redundancies and protection, you can move
on to the next systems and applications.

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DEVELOPING A RECOVERY STRATEGY

Once critical functions and the supporting IT infrastructure
have been identified and the impact of an outage is quantified using a monetary value or rating, a recovery strategy can
be developed to help prevent or mitigate losses.
This is also when we need to start considering any existing
contingencies or redundancies already in place. For example,
if a critical application is hosted by a service provider and under a service-level agreement, it is probably safe to say that
little to no recovery strategy is required for that application.
However, a recovery strategy is required for applications that
support critical functions but lack provisions to keep those
applications operational.
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A specific recovery strategy is determined by an organisations anticipated financial losses if critical functions are unavailable, as well as the time needed to recover necessary
applications.
An application with an RTO of within five days may do just
fine with a tape backup process, but an application that needs
to be up within an eight-hour business day might require remote data replication and/or standby IT systems at a recovery
site. Outsourcing disaster recovery is also a viable strategy:
Companies that cannot afford the cost of developing their
own recovery strategy may consider paying for DR availability
services or a DR as a service subscription.
The key is to always remember that the total cost of a recovery strategy should never exceed the losses it is designed
to prevent.

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DOCUMENTING THE RECOVERY PLAN

The next step is to document the recovery strategy and procedure, which forms the foundation for a disaster recovery
plan. Keep it simple: Smaller businesses should not attempt
to develop an enterprise-class DR plan. Very detailed disaster
recovery plans take time to develop and are hard to maintain.
At a high level, the disaster recovery plan should outline the
priorities for system recovery, the RTO, recovery procedures,
as well as the location of data backups and the contact info
for key recovery personnel.
Testing the plan frequently will help identify what elements
are missing and need to be added, instead of discovering problems with the plan during a disaster event. Every time a recovery procedure is tested, gaps and improvements are identified
and this is how plan maturity is eventually achieved. 2
Pierre Dorion is data centre practice director and a senior consultant with Long View
Systems in Phoenix, Arizona, specialising in business continuity and DR planning
services and corporate data protection.

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Essential Guide to
Disaster Recovery is a
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