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Stages of IT Disaster Recovery Grief

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Stages of IT Disaster Recovery Grief

Stages of IT Disaster Recovery Grief

Disaster recovery grief can hit you out of nowhere if you haven’t implemented the right enterprise availability architecture. Meet our friend Dave in IT to walk us through the 5 stages of disaster grief.

Stage 1: Denial

Dave in IT: “Uh oh.  What’s that alert?  It’s just a little application crash, right?  No big deal.  I’ll have things up and running in no time.”

In the land of enterprise availability, there is no such thing as a little application crash or no big deal.  Companies have SLA with real money on the line.  Your selective reality is probably not the same perspective of your customers and stakeholders.

Stage 2: Anger

Dave in IT: “Are you kidding me.  Of all the… [censored]...times, today the application won’t start.  Ughh.  I hate this[censored]...[censored]... application.  Wait, what’s this new alert.  Seriously, now, the datacenter is down!”

It gets messy really, really fast in the fast pace, and high stakes environments. When unchecked alerts and failures happen, problems can mount quickly along with pressure, frustration and anger.

State 3: Bargaining

Dave in IT: “Hey Ard in Applications, this is Dave in IT.  Do you guys have any backups for the App1 environment? . . .Ard are you sure?  Could you just check again?  I know you’ve checked twice, but can you check one more time.  I’ll buy drinks on Taco Tuesday!”

Dave in IT: “Hey Donna DBA, this is Dave in IT. Art in Applications said you might help me out.  Did you by chance setup any database replication for that finance database or the inventory management system? . . . Are you sure?  Umh, do you remember if we have any way to recover from a umh . . . datacenter crash?”

When my daughter gets in trouble, bargaining is her first go to.  Okay, second.  The first is to disappear, but you’re too smart to just walk away from the flames.  But, Dave in IT isn’t the only one to realize that bargaining and begging is a poor substitute for a well defined strategy for high availability and disaster recovery.  Skip the bargaining and begging about your disaster because “80% of the people don’t care, and 20% are glad it’s you (paraphrased from Les Brown).”

Stage 4: Sadness

Dave in IT: “This is just great.  The application server crashed, the datacenter is down, and backups, if I can find them and if I can load them, will take hours to get restored.  There is no way I’m getting out of this… where did I put that updated resume.”

Of course you have backups, and you’ve validated them.  But there is an RTO and RPO impact of going back to those backups.  Are you able to absorb this time?  That is of course, after your data center recovers.

Step 5: Acceptance

Dave in IT: “It’s been two hours.  I never knew we had this many Executive stakeholders before.  No way I’m making it to my 2nd year anniversary after this.  Well, I guess I’ll clean out my office tomorrow.  No way I’m making it through this!”

Failures happen.  Datacenters go down.  Applications fail.  There is no denying the possibility of losing a data center, having a server fail, or an application crash.  This type of acceptance is normal, a part of improving your availability.  Accepting that you may lose your job or worse because you failed to implement an availability strategy is something the experts at SIOS Technology Corp. want to make sure you avoid.

Don’t be like Dave in IT.  Avoid the stages of disaster grief, and the hours of disaster recovery and downtime by architecting and implementing an enterprise availability architecture that includes the best of hybrid, on-premise, or cloud coupled with the best solution for monitoring, recovery, and system failover automation.

– Cassius Rhue, VP Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

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SIOS video SIOS clustering advantage

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

Each year, your task is likely to provide higher levels of service using existing infrastructure and a smaller IT budget. Tolerance for downtime or data loss is gone.  Applications have to be up 24/7 and you need to be protected whether that’s a server outage, a networking outage, application outage, or even entire data center loss. The expectation is that the amount of downtime and the amount of data loss converges on “0”.

IT professionals have more options than ever on how you’re going to support your end users whether that’s deployment of physical servers, virtual servers, or even cloud technologies. Choosing a solution comes down to understanding business objectives, technical requirements, and budget limitations as well as needing to understand how you’re going to protect the environment to ensure it is always available and you don’t have any downtime or any data loss.

This is typically done by implementing a traditional SAN based cluster involving two or more servers connected into some type of shared storage. If there is an issue, it will fail the application over and bring everything back online. SIOS software supports this and makes it easy to set up and manage. While a SAN based cluster is great for local high availability, the SAN generally represents high cost, complexity, potential failure in your clustering architecture, and it also doesn’t help you solve the disaster recovery problem.

SIOS software allows you to build out your cluster using your choice of hardware but now leveraging local storage. SIOS provides real-time block level data replication that’s fully cluster aware and integrated allowing you to leverage that very fast local storage with your cluster configuration. Also, adopting a SANLess cluster can reduce the overall cost of the solution by eliminating the SAN. As a result, you’ve not only eliminated the cost of the SAN hardware but also SAN infrastructure and administrative costs that come along with your SAN license savings. In addition, you will be cutting out that single point of failure in your clustering architecture so it won’t take down the entire environment. You can also eliminate data loss because our real-time block level data replication technology keeps the local storage in sync. Provided with the software there is also user friendly wizard-based user interfaces.

To sum things up, SIOS gives you the flexibility to protect your mission-critical applications and data in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.  Learn more about our high availability solutions.

Learn how SIOS clustering software makes protecting applications easy.

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

by Leave a Comment

The SIOS Clustering Advantage

The SIOS Clustering Advantage

Learn how SIOS clustering software makes protecting applications easy.

Each year, your task is likely to provide higher levels of service using existing infrastructure and a smaller IT budget. Tolerance for downtime or data loss is gone.  Applications have to be up 24/7 and you need to be protected whether that’s a server outage, a networking outage, application outage, or even entire data center loss. The expectation is that the amount of downtime and the amount of data loss converges on “0”.

IT professionals have more options than ever on how you’re going to support your end users whether that’s deployment of physical servers, virtual servers, or even cloud technologies. Choosing a solution comes down to understanding business objectives, technical requirements, and budget limitations as well as needing to understand how you’re going to protect the environment to ensure it is always available and you don’t have any downtime or any data loss.

This is typically done by implementing a traditional SAN based cluster involving two or more servers connected into some type of shared storage. If there is an issue, it will fail the application over and bring everything back online. SIOS software supports this and makes it easy to set up and manage. While a SAN based cluster is great for local high availability, the SAN generally represents high cost, complexity, potential failure in your clustering architecture, and it also doesn’t help you solve the disaster recovery problem.

SIOS software allows you to build out your cluster using your choice of hardware but now leveraging local storage. SIOS provides real-time block level data replication that’s fully cluster aware and integrated allowing you to leverage that very fast local storage with your cluster configuration. Also, adopting a SANLess cluster can reduce the overall cost of the solution by eliminating the SAN. As a result, you’ve not only eliminated the cost of the SAN hardware but also SAN infrastructure and administrative costs that come along with your SAN license savings. In addition, you will be cutting out that single point of failure in your clustering architecture so it won’t take down the entire environment. You can also eliminate data loss because our real-time block level data replication technology keeps the local storage in sync. Provided with the software there is also user friendly wizard-based user interfaces.

To sum things up, SIOS gives you the flexibility to protect your mission-critical applications and data in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.  Learn more about our high availability solutions.

White Paper: Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster?

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Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster

White Paper: Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster?

Ten Essential Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Cluster Solution

White Paper: Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster?
White Paper: Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster?

Learn how to protect your critical applications and data without adding unnecessary cost and risk. Companies are finding new ways to combine physical, virtual, and cloud environments to control costs and stay agile in today’s demanding marketplace.

Traditional clusters based on shared storage SANs are no longer the de facto choice for protecting business critical applications in these new environments.

Download White Paper: Do You Really Need A SAN-Based Cluster?

SIOS DataKeeper Adds High Availability Protection To Cluster

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SIOS DataKeeper Adds High Availability Protection To Cluster.png

Healthcare Platform Eliminated Need For Shared Storage with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Case Study: Leading Healthcare Provider — SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

A leading provider of enterprise platforms for the home healthcare provider market decided to add SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition as a high availability (HA) solution to minimize the risk of downtime. It had relied on its SQL Server databases to provide fast, efficient service to its end users.

Many of the company’s important applications rely on SQL Server running on a physical server in their on-premises data center. They wanted to protect their SQL Server Replication Distributor – a central database required for managing and updating all SQL databases.

The company’s best solution was to use Windows Server Failover Clustering to create a two node cluster using their existing server hardware, which was already equipped with solid state disk storage. By adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software to their cluster, they eliminated the need for shared storage. SIOS software uses fast block level replication to synchronize local storage in both of the cluster nodes, creating a storage environment that appears to WSFC as a SAN. They connected the nodes directly using crossover cables and 10Gig NICs to eliminate the cost of a network switch and ensure the fastest possible replication for real time synchronization of the cluster nodes.