Archive for disaster recovery

Disaster Recovery on Demand

May 21, 2013 / / No comments

Our prior post, A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection, discussed both the benefits and limitations of a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) strategy. As we highlighted last week, traditional disaster recovery options leave open a huge hole: At one extreme are high-cost, quick recovery time options using hosted or colocation sites and at the other extreme are low-cost, long recovery time options such as tape or disk backup.

As a result, organizations who cannot afford a cold or hot standby site have been left to either cobble together a complicated and risky DR strategy or rely solely on offsite data protection, which affords them limited business continuity.

You’ll recall that we outlined three cloud-based options that are beginning to fill this hole:

  • Recovering applications on virtual servers through a cloud provider’s catalog
  • Recovering virtual machines directly in cloud compute
  • Importing on-premises virtual machines into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools

Unfortunately, these cloud options, while viable (and certainly better than data recovery only options), still present an extraordinary amount of risk and complexity – exactly the opposite of what you want during a disaster.

Last week, we promised you a fourth answer that helps you address those issues. Today, TwinStrata launched a new solution: on-demand DR infrastructure that is completely interoperable with on-premises virtualized environments. Unlike traditional DR strategies, CloudArray DRaaS overcomes the hurdles to DR on-demand, offering:

  • 2-4 hour spin up times of DR infrastructure, whenever it is needed, without having to pay for it in the meantime. The only time organizations need to pay for the infrastructure is during disaster and disaster test scenarios.
  • A VMware environment that work seamlessly with customer’s on-premises environment. All controls and privileges are available to customers so that they can orchestrate failover and failback as seamlessly as an on-premise to on-premise environment.

CloudArray with DR On-Demand

  • No need for a time-consuming spin up and rebuild of individual servers from a cloud provider’s catalog. Instead virtual machines can be recovered via standard hypervisor tools.
  • No need for risky conversion utilities to move virtual machines from one hypervisor format to another, potentially compromising recoverability.

Most importantly, it positions an affordable DR offering that rivals and sometimes even improves upon the recovery times of cold standby disaster sites or hot-standby DR sites for a fraction of the cost.

Disaster Recovery Options: Traditional vs. TwinStrata

The far-reaching implication is a viable disaster recovery plan for virtually any organization, particularly the IT-constrained mid-market organization that may not have the wherewithal to build or manage a secondary data center. Moreover, smaller organizations struggling with a DR plan can now be compliant with regulatory standards (i.e. HIPAA, FINRA, etc.) that require them to have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Larger organizations, which already have a DR plan, can still benefit from substantial cost savings. Either way, an affordable, enterprise-class disaster recovery strategy has just become attainable for virtually any organization.

You can read the full press release for more information or join us for our webinar on May 30th, “Affordable, On-Demand Disaster Recovery: Introducing CloudArray DRaaS.”

Category: backup, Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection

May 16, 2013 / / No comments

Our prior installment in this series discussed building a roadmap to using cloud infrastructure services starting with data storage expansion as Phase 1. In today’s installment we get into Phase 2 of our proposed roadmap: using the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) and data protection.

For many mid-sized businesses struggling to maintain existing IT infrastructure, implementing a strong disaster recovery and data protection plan is either financially out of reach or difficult to maintain from a resource perspective. After all, DR planning traditionally involves purchasing redundant infrastructure that is housed off-site (e.g. remote office, co-location facility, hosting provider, etc) and remains underutilized until a disaster occurs, offering little immediate ROI.

However, you don’t need to look very far to prove that lacking a disaster plan can be perilous. Consider the amount of business lost during hurricane Sandy, which hit the northeast US in late 2012. Only a month after the hurricane, financial analysis firm IHS Global Insight estimated that the total lost business activity from Sandy totaled $25B, a staggering sum. While natural disasters are relatively infrequent, they can shut down unprepared businesses for days or weeks and result in substantial revenue losses or even business closure.

In spite of the risks, many organizations simply roll the dice, hoping that they won’t be afflicted by a disaster. They do this not out of a predilection for gambling, but rather because their resource or budgetary constraints make true disaster recovery simply unattainable. For highly regulated industries, however, rolling the dice isn’t even an option. Regulations such as HIPAA in the healthcare industry require businesses to have a disaster recovery plan in order to be compliant. In these industries, a disaster recovery plan is a requirement rather than an option.

Using Cloud for Data Recovery

Data protection is often the cornerstone for DR and many businesses have been moving to the cloud in the form of online backup. Unlike tape, data that is backed up to the cloud stays online and is available for immediate recall, meaning a restore process can be started instantly and discrete bits of data can be recalled immediately. Online backup effectively provides shorter recovery times than recovering data from tapes offsite, as illustrated in the figure below.

However, for many organizations, data recovery is simply one element of maintaining business continuity. Applications must also be restarted once data is recovered in order to get a business operational. If application servers are lost or damaged during an outage, it may take days to reconstruct an application environment. For this reason, many organizations opt for faster recovery times by using cold standby or hot standby disaster recovery sites. Both of these cases require infrastructure for hosting applications in the event of a disaster. In spite of the substantially higher costs, as illustrated in the chart above, alternatives for rapid application recovery have not emerged until recently.

Using Cloud for Application Recovery

Since one of the tenets of cloud is on-demand provisioning of infrastructure, it naturally represents a more efficient way to activate redundant infrastructure for disaster recovery — on-demand and only when needed in the case of a disaster or a disaster test. A pay-as-you-go model substantially reduces costs over dedicated DR infrastructure and eliminates the inherent underutilization. Cloud also alleviates the need for an off-site DR location.

When it comes to application recovery using the cloud there are several approaches, each of which requires careful consideration. Three of these include:

  • Recovering applications on virtual servers through a cloud provider’s catalog: Although this recovery process may be viable for small workloads, it can be a time consuming manual process. This is particularly true when attempting to recover tens or hundreds of servers.
  • Recovering virtual machines directly in cloud compute: A faster approach than the above involves recovering virtual machines in the cloud, similar to failover of virtual machines between hypervisors. This is possible if the same hypervisor runs on-premise and in the cloud. However, while moving virtual machine (VM) images between like hypervisors is generally straightforward, many cloud providers may not offer sufficient administrative privilege in their virtual compute environments or simply may not be compatible with on-premise hypervisors.
  • Importing on-premise virtual machines into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools: The promise of this approach is that it addresses hypervisor incompatibility between on-premise and cloud environments. However, it is important to ensure that conversion scripts and tools operate correctly across all virtual machines, since an import failure during a disaster can be a show-stopper. Also, be sure to confirm that the scripts/tools can operate bidirectionally, meaning they allow a way to eventually fail back virtual machines back to the on-premise environment.

Like any major IT project, DR in the cloud requires a certain degree of planning and also regular testing — but the payoff can be substantial in terms of reducing disaster recovery costs, improving resilience and achieving compliance with regulatory requirements.

Next week, we’ll look at a fourth option that addresses many of the failings of the options outlined above while still delivering on all of the benefits.

 

Category: backup, Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , ,

Maximize your data storage strategy using the cloud

March 19, 2013 / / No comments

Earlier this year, Gartner published their list of Top 10 Cloud Storage Providers, highlighting key features and differentiators of the top cloud storage providers in the world. More importantly, the report highlights the emergence of a maturing industry of cloud storage providers offering a new option for businesses thinking about their next data storage purchase.

Although each cloud storage provider has a unique set of strengths, nearly all offer a common set of cloud storage benefits that include:

  1. A nearly unlimited supply of on-demand capacity: organizations can avoid the dreaded cycle of refreshes, upgrades and migrations from running out of capacity
  2. Multi-site redundancy: most cloud storage providers offer multi-copy and data center redundancy for disaster tolerance
  3. Reduced maintenance: cloud storage means never having to touch or replace a disk drive or go through storage maintenance cycles, instead outsourcing all storage management to the cloud
  4. Zero capex expenditure: pay-as-you-go models enable paying only for the capacity in use, eliminating capital equipment expenses, over-purchasing and underutilization
  5. Reduced cost of ownership: the costs of purchasing, maintaining and managing a local storage infrastructure can be substantial. Forrester has demonstrated a 74% cost savings of cloud storage versus traditional storage.

By integrating the cloud into their storage environments, organizations can relieve themselves of the unrelenting storage cycle burden – data growth –> storage scramble –> endless maintenance –> tech refresh/data migration –> rinse and repeat.

Another consideration when moving data to the cloud is the additional value of cloud-integrated storage, which makes accessing cloud storage as easy and secure as local storage. Cloud-integrated storage enables familiar NAS and SAN interfaces for instant application compatibility and fast local-speed data access among its many benefits.

But while today’s primary drivers toward cloud storage often equate to building a better mousetrap, forward-thinking organizations have stretched their vision and have begun to outline how moving their data to the cloud can be used for competitive advantage. Beyond the common capabilities and benefits, what are other key considerations when looking to deploy cloud storage?

A recent GigaOm article calls cloud storage the crack cocaine of cloud computing. Though this is not an ideal analogy to describe an offering with a very compelling value proposition, truth is, there are various high-value services that can make the cloud more than just a resting place for data. On-demand business continuity/disaster recovery and analytics services are perfect examples of using the cloud as an extension of compute infrastructure in addition to storage. Both represent a great way to derive additional value from moving data to the cloud.

The verdict? Today, cloud-integrated storage can deliver a solution that is more efficient, cost-effective and lower maintenance than traditional storage. And that in itself is probably enough to seriously consider implementing it. But that’s only the beginning. Tomorrow, that same solution will do more than just alleviate you of storage pain – it will unlock a host of services and capabilities that will strengthen your business and deliver competitive advantage.

The cloud storage industry is rapidly maturing and can offer nearly any organization a wealth of benefits. It is worth consideration as a bona fide alternative to traditional storage. Look for differentiators that can provide additional value to your business.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , ,

Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2013

December 19, 2012 / / No comments

With the end of the year upon us, the time has come to boldly make ten cloud data predictions for 2013. As anyone who has attempted to forecast the future may attest, predictions that are substantive and hold true are often hard to come by.

To that end, I’ve tried to avoid enumerating the obvious — such as a drop in cloud storage pricing, more public cloud adoption, the possibility that a cloud outage may occur and other events that are pretty much a given for 2013. I’ve also steered clear of the moon shots — such as cloud storage standards gaining broad adoption, on-premise storage infrastructure disappearing entirely, an agreement by major vendors to put an end to “cloud-washing” and other ambitious predictions that are somewhat disconnected from reality.

So without further ado, below are my ten hot cloud data trends for 2013:

  1. Software-defined storage: The storage industry did not really need a new buzzword in 2012, but like it or not, this one will stick. Here’s why: Software-defined storage utilizes software on commodity servers to enable automation and economies of scale. Sound familiar? While the terminology is new, the concept is familiar to those who understand cloud. A recent article by Jerome Lecat provides a good perspective on the need for software-defined storage. The downside? Similar to its cloud storage forebear, we can expect this new buzzword to be abused as the new label “du jour” for many products that don’t quite fit the description.
  2. Data monetization using cloud: 2013 will highlight a key differentiator of cloud storage aside from providing cost and administrative advantages over traditional storage: the ability for organizations to use their data to grow their business. The concept of data monetization is mature and well-understood, but not always easily attainable. With on-demand cloud infrastructure, the logistics of harnessing data to improve business revenues become much simpler. Look for targeted solutions emerging in the coming year.
  3. Managed private clouds: I predict a splintering of the private cloud market into managed private clouds and DIY private clouds. Arguably, one of the most compelling benefits of public cloud storage is the outsourcing of management and maintenance. With many enterprises requiring cloud within their four walls, managed private clouds comply with that requirement while still offering the outsourcing advantage of public cloud. Downside? The cost of entry may be high for smaller enterprises or mid-size organizations.
  4. Turnkey DIY private clouds: For smaller enterprises looking at private cloud storage, wrestling with open source can be an unwieldy option. Companies such as Mirantis, SwiftStack and others have come to the rescue, launching OpenStack-based private clouds that attempt to reduce the burden of building, configuring and maintaining private clouds, offering turnkey utilities and management tools. Improved usability and management will be key to the uptake of DIY private clouds.
  5. Cloud-integrated storage: While it is mostly a matter of terminology, cloud-integrated storage will replace the cloud storage gateway for enabling hybrid storage configurations that span on-premise and in-cloud. In some sense, it is a maturation of the cloud storage gateway industry, recognizing that organizations creating hybrid cloud storage environments still require storage on-premise. Cloud-integrated storage satisfies the local storage need and offers near unlimited capacity in the cloud.
  6. SSD hybrid storage in the cloud: With multiple providers introducing SSD as a tier of storage in cloud compute environments, all-SSD configurations might prevail for high-performance application deployments. However, with more than an order of magnitude price disparity between SSD and rotating media, a hybrid configuration combining both may make more economic sense for optimizing price/performance for the majority of workloads. Expect hybrid SSD to fill a gap until there is true pricing parity between SSD and disk storage.
  7. Disaster recovery as a service in the public cloud (DRaaS): OK, I’ll admit this was a 2012 prediction, but technologies have advanced and the economics of DRaaS are just too attractive to ignore. Although zero down time business continuity is difficult to deliver, solutions using the cloud continue to inch closer to that standard. I predict disaster recovery in the cloud without dedicated infrastructure will finally hit the mainstream in 2013.
  8. Analytics as a service in the public cloud: Although similar to a 2012 prediction, I added “as a service” for 2013. The tools to move data into the cloud are available today. Similarly, the tools to run analytics in the public cloud are also here. What’s missing? Delivering both as an integrated service.
  9. Cloud brokerages: While not expected to hit the mainstream, some aspects of the cloud brokerage will appear in advanced data center operations that demand the choice of one or many cloud providers for specific solutions. Similarly, system integrators and consulting organizations have begun to assist advanced organizations in making cloud provider selections. With cloud-integrated storage supporting multiple simultaneous cloud providers, the foundation is available today for working with a choice of cloud providers based on price, performance, reliability and other attributes.
  10. Flattening of traditional storage infrastructure sales: Given the significant cloud storage adoption in 2012, I predict  a flattening of traditional storage sales by year end next year. With organizations continuing to store archive and unstructured data for compliance, retention and other uses, cloud storage will emerge as a compelling alternative and with predictions of the cloud storage market hitting upwards of $40B by 2018, it’s bound to impact on-premise storage.

So how do you think these predictions will fare in 2013? Is there anything missing? The answers are only 12 months away.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , ,

Cloud-Integrated Storage Broadens Its Appeal

November 7, 2012 / / No comments

While there is no denying that cloud storage has delivered the promise of unlimited “pay-as-you-go” storage capacity, simplified disaster recovery, and savings in costs and maintenance, these attributes alone aren’t driving the growing business adoption. Instead, it is the rise of cloud-integrated storage appliances, which have augmented cloud storage to provide the levels of security, availability, connectivity and performance found in traditional storage systems, that has made cloud storage a viable choice for business.

With this week’s announcement of TwinStrata CloudArray 4.0, the flexibility, availability and performance of cloud-integrated storage has improved further, narrowing the functionality gap between cloud-integrated storage and traditional data storage systems, while leveraging all of the benefits of cloud. Some of the highlights include:

  • Choice of server connectivity: With iSCSI and NAS connectivity options, the broadest range of applications now seamlessly interoperate with cloud storage, regardless of whether the requirement is file or block-based access
  • High-performance: New appliances offering hybrid SSD configurations enable demanding applications to use cloud storage without the expected performance tradeoff of cloud storage
  • “Future-proof” platform flexibility: New in-cloud platforms, in addition to virtual and physical platforms, protect investment in cloud-integrated storage that can continue to be leveraged even if your environment migrates from physical to virtual or entirely into the cloud
  • Broadest choice of providers: Over 20 different cloud providers to choose from means there is never any worry of vendor lock and always the choice of best-of-breed cloud storage
  • Higher availability: Fully redundant appliances with no single point of failure allow data to either be stored directly to cloud or local copies replicated to the cloud, minimizing risk of downtime and offering a built-in disaster strategy without offsite infrastructure

If you haven’t yet considered augmenting your IT environment with cloud-integrated storage, now is the time to examine all of the benefits cloud storage can offer. We’ll be hosting a webinar next Wednesday to talk about our new enterprise-class capabilities and how our customers are using cloud-integrated storage to streamline their storage environments. If you’d like to join us, feel free to register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/586633720

Category: Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , ,

Disaster Recovery Ascends to the Cloud, Part II – Deployment Considerations

October 25, 2012 / / No comments

As mentioned in Part I of this series, cloud technology has introduced a viable alternative to the practice of creating secondary sites for disaster recovery (DR), promising to save IT organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in infrastructure and maintenance. While the cost reduction associated with replacing dedicated DR infrastructure is intuitive, the ability of cloud solutions to meet the recovery times (RTOs and RPOs) dictated by businesses is often less well understood.

Part I suggested two key considerations in recovering IT operations from a disaster are (1) regaining access to data and (2) regaining access to applications. Today’s cloud integrated storage or cloud storage gateways can push backups or live data sets to the cloud easily and securely, enabling the first element of a cloud DR solution. With this in mind, let’s examine two strategies for application recovery using cloud-based DR:

Strategy 1: Data copies in-cloud, application recovery off-cloud

One of the simpler approaches to cloud-based DR stores data copies in the cloud and allows external, off-cloud access by applications in the case of a primary site outage. With data in the cloud accessible from nearly anywhere, applications may be recovered at a secondary site if they cannot be recovered at the primary site.

The advantage of this approach is the elimination of dedicated secondary storage infrastructure for DR. The disadvantage is the requirement for a secondary site for application recovery.

An improvement to this approach involves leveraging a hosting provider as the application recovery site, where new application servers can be provisioned on-demand in case of a disaster. Using a hosted recovery site can be considerably faster than restoring and rebuilding the original application environment and more economical than maintaining a dedicated secondary site. However, recovery times may be impacted by the time it takes for the hosting provider to provision new servers.

Application recovery off-cloud versus in-cloud

Strategy 2: Data copies in-cloud, application recovery in-cloud

Perhaps a more ideal approach to cloud-based DR enables both data and application recovery in the cloud without the need for a secondary site for applications or storage. Cloud compute as-a-service represents an attractive environment for recovering applications by rapidly spinning up new virtual servers.

When using a cloud storage gateway to replicate data to the cloud, consider cloud gateways with the ability to run in the cloud. Cloud servers can then attach to the gateway to facilitate application recovery.

The process of application recovery may involve activating servers and applications via a cloud provider’s catalog. Although this process is much faster than provisioning new physical hardware, it can still be time consuming, particularly when attempting to recover tens or hundreds of servers.

Alternatively, virtual machines that resided on-premise can be reinstantiated in the cloud, similar to failover of virtual machines between hypervisors. This is possible if the same hypervisor runs on-premise and in the cloud. However, while moving virtual machine (VM) images between like hypervisors is generally straightforward, many cloud providers may not offer sufficient administrative privilege in their virtual compute environments or may not be compatible with on-premise hypervisors.

To get around these limitations and incompatibilities, an emerging option involves importing on-premise VMs into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools. An important consideration is ensuring that these conversion scripts and tools operate bidirectionally, meaning they allow a way to eventually export VMs back to the on-premise environment.

The keys to success are testing and working with a partner you trust

While there are a variety of ways to deploy DR in the cloud, there are many subtleties and details to consider. Not surprisingly, the devil is often in the details.

Keep in mind that an important aspect of any DR strategy is conducting regular testing and validation. Additionally, working with technology partners who understand the advantages and tradeoffs of DR in the cloud can be particularly helpful.

Like any major IT undertaking, DR in the cloud requires significant planning — but the payoff can be substantial if reducing disaster recovery costs and improving availability are important to your business.

Category: Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , ,

Using Multiple Clouds to Improve IT Resilience

April 17, 2012 / / No comments

A recent GigaOm article proclaimed “There’s no need to be a one-cloud company.” The article proceeded to highlight reasons why organizations ought to consider distributing their cloud-based applications and risk across multiple cloud providers. While such a tactic may seem unnecessary given the redundancy and SLAs that many cloud providers offer, historical events suggest there is indeed wisdom in relying on more than one cloud.

Nearly one year has elapsed since the Amazon EC2 outage of 2011 that took down a number of online businesses including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora, but the impact has not been forgotten. One of the key takeaways from that outage was that organizations using cloud-based IT are responsible for building and following best practices for protecting their infrastructure against outages of all types –not just service interruptions, but also user errors, viruses and even data loss. Off-site backup and disaster recovery are standard practices for traditional on-premise IT. For organizations running their business-critical applications in the cloud, achieving the same levels of resilience means extending infrastructure “off-cloud” or across multiple clouds.

While one can concoct elaborate schemes for extending compute environments across multiple clouds, a simple starting point is extending backup and data protection off-cloud. Cloud gateway solutions that operate in cloud compute environments, like CloudArray, are ideal for backing up or replicating business-critical application data to different physical locations in the same cloud or to external cloud providers.

Although cloud storage gateways are more frequently deployed in on-premise environments, they are equally effective replicating data from cloud-to-cloud. For organizations lacking on-premise infrastructure, cloud-to-cloud backup, replication and continuous data protection can help them meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) required for their critical data.

Cloud storage gateways enable organizations to make their data and applications in the cloud more resilient with the disaster recovery capability that is an essential aspect of most IT deployments. If you are running or thinking about running business-critical applications in the cloud, consider the peace of mind afforded by off-cloud data protection.

Category: disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , ,
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