| November 2, 2021 |
Disaster Recovery |
| 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
- https://betanews.com/2019/05/28/disaster-recovery-sql-server/
- https://community.spiceworks.com/blog/3138-data-snapshot-how-well-equipped-are-businesses-to-bounce-back-from-disaster
- https://www.spiceworks.com/press/releases/spiceworks-study-reveals-one-in-four-companies-never-test-their-disaster-recovery-plan/
See our White Paper: Understanding Disaster Recovery for Options for SQL Server
Reproduced with permission from SIOS
Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery
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
Disaster Recovery Made Simple
Disaster Recovery Made Simple
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
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. 7 percent have experienced seven or more. In short, a DR event is nearly inevitable. Be sure you conduct regular testing to ensure you know exactly what will happen when it does.
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
