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Disaster Recovery

November 2, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Disaster Recovery

How to Enable Disaster Recovery with a Single Clustering Software Solution

Protect Windows or Linux Applications Operating in any Combination of Physical, Virtual, Cloud, or Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures with Disaster Recovery

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery is Critical to Continued Business Operations

Disaster recovery (DR) is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that ensure critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a man-made or natural disaster happens. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan, which is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that get the entire business back up and running after a disaster.

But when we speak of a disaster, it does not need to be a full-fledged hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake that impacts your business. Disasters come in many forms, including a cyber-attack, user error, fire, theft, vandalism, even a terrorist attack. In short, a disaster is any crisis that results in a down system for a long duration and/or major data loss on a large scale that impacts your IT infrastructure, data center, and your business.

Disaster Recovery

In a recent Spiceworks survey, 59 percent of organizations indicated they had experienced one to three outages (that is, any interruption to normal levels of IT-related service) over the course of one year, 11 percent have experienced four to six, and 7 percent have experienced seven or more. In addition, the survey also indicates that larger companies, which rely on a greater number of services, are more likely to experience outages than smaller organizations. For example, 71 percent of small businesses experienced one or more outages in the last 12 months, compared to 79 percent of mid-size businesses, and 87 percent of large businesses. When you look at those statistics, you know you are living on borrowed time if you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place.

But there is good news. Compared with statistics from previous years, it appears that organizations of all sizes and from all industries are doing better when it comes to having a disaster recovery plan in place. According to the same Spiceworks survey, 95 percent of organizations have a DR plan in place but unfortunately, 23 percent never test or exercise their plan. Exercising your DR plan is as important as a student fire drill or muster drill. Having a plan in place is just the first step. If the people involved in executing the plan don’t know what to do, you won’t be able to recover from a disaster.

High Availability Vs. Disaster Recovery

But before we go any further, let’s be clear on the difference between best practices for handling a system failure versus a disaster. To recover from a system failure, redundant systems, software, and data should be on your local area network (LAN). For critical database applications, you can replicate data synchronously across the LAN. This makes your standby instance “hot” and in sync with your active instance, so it is ready to take over immediately in the event of a failure. This is referred to as high availability (HA).

However, to recover systems, software, and data in the event of a disaster means redundant components must be on a wide-area network (WAN). With a WAN, data replication is asynchronous to avoid negatively impacting throughput performance. This means that updates to standby instances will lag updates made to the active instance, resulting in a delay during the recovery process. Since disasters are rare, some delay may be tolerable and is dependent upon (a) how critical it is to your business to achieve the lowest possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and (b) how much budget you can allocate to achieve the best RTO and RPO.

RTO is the maximum tolerable duration of any outage and RPO is the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a disaster happens. For disaster recovery, RTOs of many minutes or even hours is common with some solutions as it is too expensive to try to recover across a WAN in just a few minutes. For mission-critical applications, your organization will want to achieve a low RPO but the lower your RPO, the more you need processes in place to ensure all data has been replicated on the standby server before failover. This effort tends to increase recovery time.

But with SIOS disaster recovery solution, you can achieve a minimal-to-no-data-loss RPO and an RTO of one to two minutes.

SIOS Delivers One Solution to Meet Your HA and DR Needs

Whether you need local HA within a single site or fast, efficient DR across multiple sites, SIOS solutions meet all your business continuity needs.

The SIOS disaster recovery solution is a multi-site, geographically dispersed cluster that provides RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes. What makes SIOS different than many other DR providers is that it offers one solution that meets both high availability and disaster recovery needs.

To support DR, you configure your clusters the same way as you do for high availability but with two distinct differences previously discussed:

The DR cluster node(s) are in a geographic site – on-premises, virtual, or in the cloud – that is further away from the HA instance.
The DR site is on a wide-area network (WAN), which means that data replication will be asynchronous to avoid negatively impacting throughput performance.

Remember, asynchronous data replication means that updates to the DR instances will lag updates made to the active instance but typically only by a few seconds at most. But with SIOS’ incredibly fast data replication across the WAN, you can keep real-time copies of data synchronized across multiple servers and data centers to achieve both HA and DR.

In addition to one single solution for HA/DR and real-time data replication, the SIOS HA/DR solution also provides:

Block-level data compression to minimize network loads
Bandwidth throttling to regulate and minimize network congestion
WAN optimization to improve network performance
Integration with push-button failover to support DR and automatic failover to support HA
An agnostic platform approach, allowing you to choose on-premises, virtual, cloud, or a hybrid DR solution

The following case study showcases the use of SIOS DataKeeper to deliver HA and DR in a single solution.

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Enabling HA and DR Protection at a Premier Health Center

ALYN Hospital, located in Israel, is a premier pediatric rehabilitation health center, specializing in diagnosing and rehabilitating infants, children, and adolescents with physical disabilities. Parents bring their children from Israel and abroad to receive a wide range of medical services, paramedical therapies, and additional state-of-the-art rehabilitation services.

The Search for the Right Solution

ALYN Hospital operates a variety of applications – including electronic medical records (EMR), customer relationship management (CRM), SQL Server databases, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Office in support of its clinical and administrative operations. As a healthcare provider, the hospital is subject to strict government regulations and needed to implement strong DR provisions to ensure the protection and availability of their mission-critical applications. The hospital chose Hyper-V Replica to support its DR strategy, operating two, physically separated server rooms on-premises, enabling all critical virtual machines (VNs) running on any Hyper-V host server to be replicated to another in the other room. Unfortunately, this configuration was not satisfying RPO and RTO requirements, so the IT team started to investigate other options.

In looking for the right DR solution, the IT team considered Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), which uses shared storage. Unfortunately, ALYN did not have a SAN in place and because of budget restrictions, it was cost-prohibitive to implement identical SANs in both server rooms. For this reason, ALYN investigated third-party solutions.

In its search for third-party failover clustering software, ALYN established three criteria:

The solution had to work with existing hardware.
The solution had to provide both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protection across all hospital critical applications.
The total cost of ownership (TCO) had to fit within the department’s limited budget.

SIOS DataKeeper – The Obvious Choice

After evaluating several different solutions, the IT staff chose SIOS DataKeeper, which the team described as a solution “that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership” and delivers HA and DR in a single cost-effective solution.

SIOS DataKeeper combines real-time, block-level data replication with continuous application-level monitoring and flexible failover/failback policies in a total solution that is easy to implement and manage. DataKeeper leverages WSFC and maintains compatibility with the operating environment, making it easy for the IT team to quickly learn how to use the solution and quickly complete HA configurations for all applications.

With DataKeeper, the IT team can create three-node SANless failover clusters with a single active instance and two standby instances. With this configuration, ALYN can continuously update systems and software without disrupting operations because the active instance can be moved to any server in a three-node cluster and remain fully protected during periods of planned hardware and software maintenance.

In addition, SIOS can work with any type of storage and WAN-optimized data replication, which simplifies the implementation of ALYN’s remote DR site. To maintain high transactional throughput performance, data replication across the WAN occurs asynchronously but SIOS DataKeeper employs special techniques to optimize data transmission, allowing ALYN to achieve demanding RPOs and RTOs.

The Bottom Line

Today, SIOS DataKeeper is providing high availability protection for all of ALYN Hospital’s mission-critical applications. Comments Uri Inbar, ALYN Hospital IT Director, “With SIOS we found a solution that delivers carrier-class capabilities with a remarkably low total cost of ownership. For us, it was an obvious choice.

ALYN Hospital tests the configuration regularly, and routinely changes the active and standby designations, while redirecting the data replication as needed during planned software updates. The applications continue to run uninterrupted.

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Final Thoughts on SIOS Disaster Recovery

In a Windows environment, SIOS DataKeeper for Windows Server is available in both a Standard Edition and a more robust Cluster Edition. SIOS DataKeeper Standard Edition provides real-time data replication for disaster recovery protection in a Windows Server environment. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition seamlessly integrates with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), enabling both high availability and disaster recovery configurations.

SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper support all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Oracle Linux and accommodates a wide range of storage architectures.

Visit the references below for more information on SIOS DataKeeper or SIOS LifeKeeper:

References

See our White Paper: Understanding Disaster Recovery for Options for SQL Server

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

October 30, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

If this topic sounds confusing, we get it. With our experts’ advice, we hope to temper your apprehensions – while also raising some important considerations for your organisation before or after going multi-cloud. Planning for disaster recovery is a common point of confusion for companies employing cloud computing, especially when it involves multiple cloud providers.

It’s taxing enough to ensure data protection and disaster recovery (DR) when all data is located on-premises. But today many companies have data on-premises as well as with multiple cloud providers, a hybrid strategy that may make good business sense but can create challenges for those tasked with data protection. Before we delve into the details, let’s define the key terms.

What is multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is the utilization of two or more cloud providers to serve an organization’s IT services and infrastructure. A multi-cloud approach typically consists of a combination of major public cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

Organizations choose the best services from each cloud provider based on costs, technical requirements, geographic availability, and other factors. This may mean that a company uses Google Cloud for development/test, while using AWS for disaster recovery, and Microsoft Azure to process business analytics data.

Multi-cloud differs from hybrid cloud which refers to computing environments that mix on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.

Who uses multiple clouds?

Regulated industries – Many organizations run different business operations in different cloud environments. This may be a deliberate strategy of optimizing their IT environments based on the strengths of individual cloud providers or simply the product of a decentralized IT organization.

Media and Entertainment – Today’s media and entertainment landscape is increasingly composed of relatively small and specialized studios that meet the swelling content-production needs of the largest players, like Netflix and Hulu. Multi-cloud solutions enable these teams to work together on the same projects, access their preferred production tools from various public clouds, and streamline approvals without the delays associated with moving large media files from one site to another.

Transportation and Autonomous Driving – Connected car and autonomous driving projects generate immense amounts of data from a variety of sensors. Car manufacturers, public transportation agencies, and rideshare companies are among those motivated to take advantage of multi-cloud innovation, blending both accessibility of data across multiple clouds without the risks of significant egress charges and slow transfers, while maintaining the freedom to leverage the optimal public cloud services for each project.

Energy Sector – Multi-cloud adoption can help lower the significant costs associated with finding and drilling for resources. Engineers and data scientists can use machine learning (ML) analytics to identify places that merit more resources to prospect for oil, to gauge environmental risks of new projects, and to improve safety.

Multi-cloud disaster recovery pain points:

Not reading before you sign. Customers may face issues if they fail to read the fine print in their cloud agreements. The cloud provider is responsible for its computer infrastructure, but customers are responsible for protecting their applications and data. There are many reasons for application downtime that are not covered under cloud SLAs. Business critical workloads need high availability and disaster recovery protection software as well.

Developing a centralized protection policy. A centralized protection policy must be created to cover all data, no matter where it lives. Each cloud provider has its unique way of accessing, creating, moving and storing data, with different storage tiers. It can be cumbersome to create a disaster recovery plan that covers data across different clouds.

Reporting. This is important for ensuring protection of data in accordance with the service-level agreements that govern it. Given how quickly users can spin up cloud resources, it can be challenging to make sure you’re protecting each resource appropriately and identifying all data that needs to be incorporated into your DR plan.

Test your DR plan. Customers must fully screen and test their DR strategy. A multi cloud strategy compounds the need for testing. Some providers may charge customers for testing, which reinforces the need to read the fine print of the contract.

Resource skill sets. Finding an expert in one cloud can be challenging; with multi-cloud you will either need to find expertise in each cloud, or the rare individual with significance in multiple clouds.

Overcoming the multi-cloud DR challenge

Meeting these challenges requires companies to develop a data protection and recovery strategy that covers numerous issues. Try asking yourself the following strategic questions:

Have you defined the level of criticality for all applications and data? How much money will a few minutes of downtime for critical applications cost your organization in end user productivity, customer satisfaction, and IT labor?
Will data protection and recovery be handled by IT or application owners and creators in a self-service model?
Did you plan for data optimization, using a variety of cloud- and premises-based options?
How do you plan to recover data? Restoring data to cloud-based virtual machines or using a backup image as the source of recovery?

Obtain the right multi-cloud DR solution

The biggest key to success in data protection and recovery in a multi-cloud scenario is ensuring you have visibility into all of your data, no matter how it’s stored. Tools from companies enable you to define which data and applications should be recovered in a disaster scenario and how to do it – whether from a backup image or by moving data to a newly created VM in the cloud, for example.

The tool should help you orchestrate the recovery scenario and, importantly, test it. If the tool is well integrated with your data backup tool, it can also allow you to use backups as a source of recovery data, even if the data is stored in different locations – like multiple clouds. Our most recent SIOS webinar discusses this same point; watch it here if you’re interested. SIOS Datakeeper lets you run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform without sacrificing performance, high availability or disaster protection. SIOS DataKeeper is available in the AWS Marketplace and the only Azure certified high availability software for WSFC offered in the Azure Marketplace.

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

October 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

While researching reasons to migrate to the cloud, you’ve probably learned that the benefits of cloud computing include scalability, reliability, availability, and more. But what, exactly, do those terms mean? Let’s consider high availability (HA), as it is often the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud for many companies.

The idea is to make your products, services, and tools accessible to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection. That means ensuring your critical applications are operational – even through hardware failures, software issues, human errors, and sitewide disasters – at least 99.99% of the time (that’s the definition of high availability).

While public cloud providers typically guarantee some level of availability in their service level agreements, those SLAs only apply to the cloud hardware. There are many reasons for application downtime that aren’t covered by SLAs. For this reason, you need to protect these applications with clustering software that will detect issues and reliably move operations to a standby server if necessary. As you plan what and how you will make solutions available in the cloud, remember that it is important that your products and services and cloud infrastructure are scalable, reliable, and available when and where they are needed.

Quick Stats on High Availability in the Cloud in 2021

Now that we’ve defined availability in the cloud context, let’s look at its impact on organizations and businesses. PSA, these statistics may shock you, but don’t fret. We’ve also got some solutions to these pressing and costly issues.

As much as 80% of Enterprise IT will move to the cloud by 2025 (Oracle).
The average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $11,600 per minute (Gartner; Comparitech).
Average IT staffing to employee ratio is 1:27 (Ecityworks).
22% of downtime is the result of human error (Cloudscene).
In 2020, 54% of enterprises’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud, while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud (Forbes).
1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan (HBJ).
70% of companies have suffered a public cloud data breach in the past year (HIPAA).
48% of businesses store classified information on the cloud (Panda Security).
96% of businesses experienced an outage in a 3-year period (Comparitech).
45% of companies reported downtime from hardware failure (PhoenixNAP).

What You Can Do – Stay Informed

If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, join us. The SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium is taking place Wednesday, September 22nd (EMEA) and Thursday, September 23rd (US) in a global virtual conference format for IT professionals focusing on the availability needs of the enterprise IT customer. This event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Cloud Symposium Speakers & Sessions Posted

We have selected speakers presenting a wide range of sessions supporting availability for multiple areas of the data application stack. Check out the sessions posted and check back for additional presentations to be announced! Learn more

Register Now

Whether you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, this event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Reproduced from SIOS

Disaster Recovery Made Simple

October 22, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Disaster Recovery Made Simple

Heard the term disaster recovery (DR) thrown around often? DR is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools. It ensures critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a man-made or natural disaster happens. It typically involves moving application operation to a redundant DR environment that is geographically separated from the primary environment. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan. The latter is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools to ensure business operations continue through an interruption in service.

It may sound confusing at first. But we’ve collected some quick facts to make disaster recovery simple to understand:

Point 1. Implement an IT disaster recovery or a disaster recovery plan (DRP)

A DRP is a strategy and set of policies, procedures, and tools that ensure critical IT systems, databases, and applications continue to operate and be available to users when a disaster strikes the organization’s primary computing environment. While the IT team owns the disaster recovery strategy, DR is an important component of every organization’s Business Continuity Plan.

Point 2. Ensure Geographic Separation

An essential part of application disaster recovery is ensuring there is a redundant, geographically separated application environment available. You have either efficient, block level replication and or a clustering software that can failover operation to it in the event of a disaster. If your application is running in a cloud, your clustering environment should failover across cloud regions and availability zones for disaster recovery.

Point 3. Test, test, and test some more

Point 4. Understand Your Risk

The disaster in DR does not need to be a full-fledged hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake that impacts your business. Disasters come in many forms, including a cyber-attack, fire, theft, or vandalism. In fact, simple human error still rates among the leading causes of IT data center downtime. In short, a disaster is any crisis that results in a down system for a long duration and/or major data loss on a large scale that impacts your IT infrastructure, data center, and your business.

Point 5. Ensure Your DRP has a Checklist

It should include critical IT systems and network prioritized by their expected time for recovery (RTO). Document the steps needed to restart, reconfigure and recover systems and networks. Employees should know where to locate the DRP and how to execute basic emergency steps in the event of an unforeseen incident.

Point 6. Substantiate DRPs through testing

DRPs should identify deficiencies and provides opportunities to fix problems before a disaster occurs. Testing can offer proof that the plan is effective and that it will enable you to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs). Since IT systems and technologies are constantly changing, DR testing also helps ensure a disaster recovery plan is up to date.

Choose a failover clustering technology that makes DR testing simple by facilitating fast, simple, reliable switchover of application operation to DR nodes and back.

When you look at those statistics, you know you are living on borrowed time if you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place. The SIOS disaster recovery solution is a multi-site, geographically dispersed cluster that meets RPO and RTOs with ease. What makes SIOS different from many other DR providers is that it offers one solution that meets both high availability and disaster recovery needs. To learn more about our DR solutions, check out the insights page here.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

RTO vs. RPO: Learning the Difference to Achieve Your Operational Goals

October 10, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

RTO vs. RPO: Learning the Difference to Achieve Your Operational Goals

In addition to 99.99% availability time, high availability environments also need to meet stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives, RTO and RPO, respectively. RTO and RPO are two key parameters that businesses should define before creating their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Both metrics help to design the recovery process, and to define the recovery time limits, the frequency of backups, and the recovery procedures. Although RTO and RPO may seem alike, there are core differences you should consider. Read on to understand the difference between RTO vs. RPO.

To be clear, RTO is a measure of the time elapsed from application failure to restoration of application operation. It is a measure that dictates how much time you have to recover after disaster strikes. On the other hand, RPO is a measure of how up-to-date the data is when application availability has been restored after a downtime issue. It is often described as the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a failure happens.

Things to consider for evaluating your disaster recovery plan

First, it’s important to define the criticality of the application and its associated data to core business operations. How much does a minute of downtime or data loss for this application cost the company? Next, consider the potential set of disasters against which you would like to protect your organization. Some disasters that require data recovery and backup include:

Data loss: This may be as simple as someone deleting a folder, or as complex as a case of ransomware or an infected database.
Application loss: This refers to when changes to security, an update, or system configurations negatively impact services.
System loss: This includes when hardware fails, or, virtual server crashes.
Datacenter loss: This includes data centers that are on-premises and in public clouds
Business location loss: In this instance, a disaster might include an electrical outage, fire, flooding, or even a chemical spill outside the building. The business facilities require recovery to an alternate location.

Reducing an organization’s RPO and RTO

It’s important to consider the RTO and RPO as they apply to different types of data. Organizations that do a file-level backup of a database, rather than investing in an offsite virtual environment, will see longer recovery times and limits to how recently updated that data will be once recovered.

Consider the possible disasters, match them with the data sets that need to be protected, and then identify the recovery objectives. These steps will then provide you the information necessary to build tactical backup solutions that meet your recovery time objective and recovery point objective.

What is RTO and RPO in SQL Server?

SQL Server allows users to set up automated log backups to be restored from a standby server. With this log shipping, users can recover a fairly recent database copy—depending on the RTO and RPO of that process. Those RTO and RPO requirements are set by users, depending on their needs, budget, and any technological network limitations.

However, SQL Server RTO and RPO are not necessarily straightforward. In many cases, the process isn’t as fast as a client may imagine. They may have an ideal RPO in mind, but slow network speeds or an incorrectly configured backup can throttle this process. In addition, restoring a log backup in this way can involve transferring large amounts of data, and this process can easily exceed the determined acceptable RTO.

Since SQL Server is typically a business-critical application, customers can easily justify HA/DR protection for it – usually in the form of a failover cluster that can failover across cloud availability zones and regions for disaster recovery. This can be accomplished easily by adding SIOS DataKeeper to a Windows Server Failover Clustering environment or by using SIOS Protection Suite in a Linux environment. Both of these solutions will deliver not only 99.99% availability but also RPO of zero and RTO of mere seconds.

Now that you know…

Ultimately, data loss prevention for business continuity is a crucial requirement for any business. Take the time to consider how you will meet your RTO and RPO goals, no matter how large or small your business is, or what internal IT operations you support. SIOS high availability clusters deliver an RPO of zero and an RTO of mere minutes.

Learn more about SIOS DataKeeper for Windows or SIOS Protection Suite for Linux

To request a free trial, let us know here.

Reproduced from SIOS