The Trouble with Tape

Tape backup can provide for the long-term archival needs of the virtual servers; however tape cannot provide the level of recoverability required for critical business applications. Rebuilding one application from tape can be a difficult and lengthy process. Recovering four or more applications at the same time from tape to rebuild one physical server will result in an excessive period of downtime, likely more than the business can afford.

Organizations may not understand how vulnerable their data and business remain to disaster - even after they've made a huge up-front and ongoing investment in tape-based disaster recovery. An article in SearchSecurity reports that in a survey of 500 IT departments, as many as
20% of routine nightly backups fail to capture all data. Among participants 40% of IT managers were unable to recover data from a tape when they needed it. This is a significant concern for corporations that are regulated as they can face the risk of being out of compliance if they cannot produce required data when they need it.

Tape backup also places limits on your recovery point objective (RPO), the point in time to which you can recover your systems should disaster
strike. Periodic tape backup guarantees hours of lost data in the event of a disaster. Suppose, for example, that a critical system fails anytime today; the best you can do is recover to yesterday's data, which will be at least twelve hours old. The later in the day disaster strikes, the older the data from which you'll recover. In addition, recovering from a disaster, any data not backed up is lost for good - unless you recreate it. The cost of permanently lost data is high and includes the cost of the revenue that the data represents, the business value you can extract from it, and the cost to recreate it. Consider:

• How much money would your company lose if you lost all your transaction data for the last twelve hours, or even the last ten minutes?
  
• What is the value of the knowledge contained in your company's last twelve hours worth of e-mails and e-mail attachments? What would it
  cost to have your engineers recreate the last twelve hours worth of original or edited CAD/CAM drawings?

How Virtualization Can Help

Virtual server technologies provide businesses and IT departments with the ability to do more with less, enabling the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. The result is reduced costs, simplified IT management, and minimized space requirements. As projects for server consolidation and server rationalization are realized, the need to protect these virtualized systems is paramount as they are running multiple business-critical applications, requiring a higher level of protection. In fact, consider the impact of a failure of a virtualized system.

Instead of incurring downtime of just one application, you will incur downtime of multiple applications. Virtual machine technologies require advanced disaster recovery and availability solutions that provide protection against data loss and downtime for the entire environment.

Even for companies which are not implementing virtualization technologies to support their production infrastructure, the same benefits of virtualization can assist their disaster recovery efforts. There are many benefits to virtualization technologies. Among them is additional flexibility and cost savings in the deployment of a disaster recovery solution. Simply put, virtualization can reduce the amount of hardware required at a disaster recovery site and simplify recovery operations.

Solutions which are based on replication and failover usually require a one-to-one pairing of production systems with disaster recovery systems. Due to interoperability issues with some server-based applications and the complexity of managing such a configuration, it either is not recommended or not possible to failover multiple physical workloads to a single OS instance running on
standard server hardware. This usually requires organizations to purchase enough hardware for the disaster recovery site to handle production capacity or make sacrifices by choosing not to protect certain systems.

By leveraging virtual machines as secondary servers in a standard replication and failover scenario, each guest operating system (Guest OS) is its own self-contained, unmodified server image. Many of these virtual machines can be run simultaneously on a single piece of hardware allowing many physical production servers to be protected by a single piece of hardware in a disaster recovery facility. Because each virtual machine is independent of one another and workloads do not need to be consolidated, managing applications and services during the recovery process is no more difficult than managing them in production. Though many factors affect server consolidation savings, enterprises have reported up to 70% cost savings with virtual machines instead of physical servers.

The success of business operations at an alternate facility is dependent upon the availability and redundancy of critical communications systems to support connectivity to internal organizations, other businesses, critical customers and the public. Our replication solution provides remote availability to essential applications and services running on any Windows® Server operating system and ensures failover to a standby server in the event of a local failure whether either system is running on physical or virtualized hardware.