|
|
| ReliableDR assures Disaster Recovery in Virtual Datacenters ReliableDR is a next-generation Disaster Recovery (DR) orchestrator for Virtual Datacenters. It enables modern practices that keep Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) aligned with corporate or institutional Business Continuity Processes (BCP).  ReliableDR orchestrates the infrastructure of Virtual Datacenters (VDCs) to:
Configure DR based on business policy allowing Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) to be assured Increase the frequency of tests and therefore assure service recoverability Speed up Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) to hours or minutes Detect configuration drifts that threaten continuity (ideally in conjunction with Evolven Comparison) ReliableDR is totally integrated with VMware environments through vCenter. It supports most major storage hardware platforms. What are the issues of assuring Disaster Recovery in today's Datacenters?
Organizations large and small face an increasingly wide range of risk scenarios, driven by the large increases in rate of change at modern datacenters, new application architectures that favor a larger number of smaller components, and pernicious and rapidly evolving malware and cyber attacks. Legislation is also evolving in most countries with stricter laws and regulations for business continuity that require stronger measures to protect data and IT systems, and ensure their quick recoverability in case of disruption. Legacy, physically-based DRM processes were built under the premise that the infrastructure had to be duplicated 1:1 across the primary and secondary sites, and the storage was backed up or replicated periodically. Recovery is slow and labor-intensive. Hardware has to be verified, and operating systems have to be booted individually. Written procedures, when available, are often out of date. RTO is constantly on the increase because:  Configuration drift is unavoidable with the very large rates of change at datacenters; therefore, the 1:1 mapping has to be sacrificed, and hardware configuration problems must be addressed manually during contingencies or DR tests
Recovery is multi-stage, typically requiring separate, labor-intensive and lengthy steps to start the hardware, the operating system and the applications; separate skills are normally needed for each stage of recovery
How does ReliableDR achieve its benefits?
 ReliableDR is a next-generation, closed-loop DR orchestrator for Virtual Datacenters. ReliableDR leverages virtualization and intelligent storage arrays to automate Recovery Assurance processes so that the RPO can be set by business policy, and RTO can be reduced to minutes.
The core capability of ReliableDR is that it is able to align BCP and DRM. ReliableDR simulates failover scenarios as often as required, certifies that recovery points are ready for use in case of disaster (or disruption), and automates the failover processes to the point where service is restored. 1. ReliableDR detects and alerts to configuration drift ReliableDR provides configuration-aware orchestration. It has the intelligence to configure recovery VMs in real time, replicating the exact configuration of VMs in the production system at the time of the last certified recovery point (CRP). If the primary site’s VMs change for instance if memory is increased in one of them, the change is reflected immediately. With ReliableDR, configuration drift between primary and secondary sites is detected upon execution of the next testing cycle. RPO policy is enforced, and an alarm is raised if a configuration threat is detected. When used also in conjunction with Evolven Comparison then even the most granular configuration changes can be identified and alerted for action. 2. ReliableDR delivers affordable, rapid and automated recovery ReliableDR drives storage hardware and hypervisor components to produce CRPs in the secondary site, where the individual snapshots can be ready for testing in a controlled and configured sequence. The snapshots generated by ReliableDR are consistent and complete: they contain all the components of the IT service that they provide, including data, operating systems, middleware, and applications. ReliableDR allows DR planners to apply business policy to the DR processes of IT services individually, depending on criticality, laws, regulations or board directives. For the most important so-called Tier1 IT services, this can be as often as every hour or every 30 minutes, and ReliableDR will generate 24 or 48 certified recovery points per day. Because recovery is fast and automated, datacenters only need enough hypervisor licenses in the secondary site to certify the individual recovery points. In case of a real contingency, the licenses used in the production datacenter can be used for recovery. 3. ReliableDR achieves RTO acceleration  ReliableDR can configure, mount and start certified recovery points very rapidly, usually in minutes. ReliableDR provides control flow logic where independent startup processes can be launched in parallel, and dependencies are implemented serially. This added intelligence reduces RTO, requires fewer skills, and less documentation, intervention and training on the part of system administrators in case of a real contingency. The improvements in RTO can be dramatic. Coupled with the ability to policy-drive the RPO generation, DR orchestration brings close alignment between IT disaster recovery processes and business policy.
4. ReliableDR supports post-certification processes ReliableDR provides support for additional, customized processes to be executed after certification. These processes can provide two additional capabilities: Move tape backup from the primary to the secondary site: for datacenters where tape backup is mandatory, the process can be brought to the recovery site and effected on the certified recovery points, thus removing overhead or the need for backup windows from production. Additional compliance processing: organizations with more intricate regulatory or statutory compliance requirements can run them on the certified recovery point at will without impacting production services.
5. ReliableDR handles real failover Upon declaring a real contingency, datacenter management can instruct ReliableDR to switch from testing mode to failover mode. Instead of using VVCs, ReliableDR generates VMs with normal network connectivity. Using its catalog of certified recovery points, systems administrators choose the snap-set to recover from, and ReliableDR proceeds to start up the snapshots using the control flow logic of each IT service restored. ReliableDR assures that there is always a recovery point that is consistent and recoverable, and ready to provide service continuity.
Want to know more?
If you like what you hear about ReliableDR and perhaps are keen to know more, then please get in touch with us to arrange an online demo of ReliableDR (using WebEx or a similar web meeting technology). Just click here to complete a few details and we will get back to you to schedule the demo within 24 hours. | |
|