Automated Disaster Recovery Solutions Promise To Reduce Downtime

When it comes to disaster planning for data centers, one of the major aspects is automated disaster recovery. Automated DR promises that there is no room for failure and everything can be recovered. However, many IT and data center managers think that there could be some hidden caveats that would need consideration before a disaster occurs. Here are some of the features of automated DR that can benefit a data sensitive organization tremendously.

1. Heterogenous Environments: This is a cause of concern in many organizations today. However, there are automated DR solutions that can handle this type of landscape and that provide recovery and replication among dissimilar hardware.
2. Full end-to-end testing: Many IT managers fear that an automated DR solution cannot be tested end-to-end without shutting down shop, leading to a degradation in up-time performance. However, modern automated DR solutions have managed to optimize their testing suites and a full end-to-end testing is very much possible without much downtime.
3. Full recovery: Some solutions do not promise recovery from the point of failure. However, automated DR uses snapshot technology and an integrated continuous disk-based backup mechanism so that recovery from the absolute point of failure can be guaranteed.
4. Multiple systems: Advanced automated DR solutions can handle up to 5 systems at a time and can bring them back up in a few minutes.

Even though they save you in critical situations, automated disaster recovery solutions – both hardware and software-based – are often extremely complex systems. The major solutions available today are VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which needs an administrator’s click. The other alternative is to use an application-based approach, such as Microsoft’s Fail-over Cluster. There is also the hosting-based heartbeat approach, where the replication server and primary server are synchronized by a heartbeat signal and if the heartbeat stops, then the fail-over process is automatically triggered. The options in this category are XOsoft from CA and Marathon.

Obviously, disaster recovery is not to be taken lightly and needs proven expertise to be successful. To get the best solution for your business needs, do get in touch with us, the data center experts, at www.lifelinedatacenters.com.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.