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Monday, May 24th, 2010 - 11:58 am EDT

The Changing Dynamics of Data Protection

Posted by: Michelle Liro

Frank Ohlhorst, former Executive Technical Editor for eWeek and award-winning IT expert, was our expert guest speaker this week for the webinar, “Cut Your DR Costs and Get Better Data Protection.” During his presentation, Frank reviewed why he believes that now is the time to rethink traditional approaches to disaster recovery. He explained why the total cost of ownership for disaster recovery solutions is on the rise, and why changing data protection dynamics are making it more economical to focus your time and budget on the prevention of downtime and data loss, rather than recovery.

Below is the summary of the audience questions from the Q&A portion of the webinar.

Q: You talked about how HA can give you a geographic advantage. What do you mean by that?
Frank Ohlhorst: High availability systems are designed to work with multiple servers and there’s no reason why you can’t have those servers located hundreds or thousands of miles apart. You get a geographic advantage because your data centers is in multiple places and regional areas, so if a weather-related or other event occurs, let’s say a blizzard up north with a power outage, your data center down south can pick up the slack without kicking users off the system. The same can be said about a data center located in an area with hurricanes or other natural disasters. The geographic separation gives you added protection.
When high availability is paired with load balancing, it helps to locate the data resources closer to where the users are requesting them. Let’s say you have users in Utah, it’s better performance-wise to have them talk to the data center in Nevada rather than Virginia. It helps on that level also. HA solutions also have the tools for monitoring what is going on with your users and network, to help you plan out how you should assign users to specific data centers for the most efficiency.

Q: I understand how high availability can handle unplanned downtime, but what about planned downtime? Can it help there as well?
Frank Ohlhorst: Yes, the idea there is being as you have multiple active systems to meet the user’s needs, you can take one of those systems down for maintenance and have the users serviced by the active machines while you make the updates and improvements. Then when you are done, just resynchronize with the other systems, move the users over to those systems and update the rest of the servers.
Another great benefit of this is for testing upgrades and changes. So take one system offline and test your upgrades to see if they work properly before you return that system to production.

Q: If I have an HA solution in place, is back-up still necessary?
Frank Ohlhorst: 99% of the time the answer to that question is yes. It depends on what your corporate needs are. There are certain situations where HA might not deal with your catastrophe. Those are usually software-damaging events, like a virus infection, that winds up getting replicated across the system. Of course, that should really be part of your security planning to prevent events like that from even happening. With today’s security technologies, it’s pretty easy to prevent that. But if you did ever have one of those events, you do need something to roll-back to, and that’s where the back-up comes in to play. Ideally though, you should be preventing that type of event, because you also have the potential to lose active data if that happens. When it comes to compliance or auditing, you have to restore data relevant to that time period to meet the needs of e-discovery, compliance, accounting audits and other similar requirements. So you can’t just say, “I have HA in place, so I don’t need to back-up.”

Q: What about data de-duplication technologies, don’t they help solve this problem of managing large volumes of data?
Frank Ohlhorst: They reduce the data footprint for sure, but what we’re talking about here is availability of the data. They can certainly reduce the size of your data footprint, you can use de-dup to speed up backups. At the end of the day though, if the system or application is not accessible to the user, then it’s not available and you haven’t met your objectives. It’s a simple matter of business logic that data de-duplication can improve performance and reduce the size of the footprint, but it doesn’t solve the problem of providing access to users during catastrophic events.

Q: Do you see continuous availability and high availability as the same, and if so, how do you differentiate between the two and the costs?
Frank Ohlhorst: There was a time when those technologies were very, very different. That was way back when we relied on expensive hardware-based solutions or appliances that provided continuous availability. High availability at that time was thought of as a method to switch from one server to another using a manual process in the case of an emergency.

High Availability technology has evolved significantly since then. Now, the two are really one in the same from a planning and software point of view. Today’s HA solutions eliminate that step of manual switchover. What you see with the vendors today is automatic HA technology that really delivers continuous availability. And the cost gap today is pretty much zero, since the technology for continuous availability and high availability has evolved to be almost one in the same.

Q: With an SRDF/S-type solution, how can we get around the fact that being geographically more separated to mitigate regional disruptions can mean slower primary system response times due to the need to remain synchronous?
Frank Ohlhorst: Let’s look at this first from the ideology of what we’re trying to do which is business continuity. So, if you encounter a situation when you lose connectivity to a system and it’s still available at another location, then you’ve met the goal there of providing continuity. And you’re in much better shape than you would be at that point if you had a disaster recovery solution instead of a business continuity solution.

The question you have to ask yourself at that point in time is: Is reduced performance better than no performance at all? For most businesses, the answer is yes. For others, if the performance lag is significant enough it can impact business. In those cases, you’ll have to work out a way to develop geographically dispersed sites can that can provide enough performance to the user sets that need access to the data. You also need to make sure that your connectivity has enough bandwidth to support your BC/HA solutions, which means the ability to replicate the data in real time across the wire. You might have to invest in larger pipes for better connectivity to support that. But again, that depends on your particular business and your needs. There is no one correct answer to this question, but the good news is that there are several solutions today that can help you solve this problem and meet the levels of availability that you need for your business.

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Disaster Recovery  Availability  Business Continuity  Continuous Availability  Data Replication  Disaster Tolerance  Fault Tolerance  High Availability  Interview  Webcast  Webinar 

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