By Xerex Bueno
If you’ve been around more than a few years, you remember when recovering from a disaster could literally take days. You had to retrieve your backup tapes, transport them to your hot site (in some cases by plane), load the backups onto your DR provider’s equipment, establish connectivity and, perhaps most important of all, cross your fingers and hope. That can be costly for your members, but it can be even more costly for you. When you add it all up, every hour you’re down can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Tapeless backups and vaulting solutions helped the matter a little. At least in such an environment you don’t have to worry about creating, maintaining and transporting backup tapes. But even then, you’re still looking at a best-case RTO (recovery time objective) of several hours. That’s still far too costly and far too disruptive. Disaster recovery, at least in the traditional sense, just doesn’t cut it.
The purpose of disaster recovery is to restore system availability. We have DR plans for the same reason we pay the electric bills, the same reason we upgrade hardware, and the same reason we’re willing to invest in highly skilled IT staff. We need to maintain system availability as best we possibly can.
But when we look at DR that way – as a way to restore system availability – we’re already admitting defeat, at least temporarily. We’re willing to accept that there may be a major disruption in system availability, and we’ll do what we can to remedy that disruption. That’s what we feel we need to do, but what we really want is uninterrupted system availability. When there’s a problem, we want it to not really be a problem – at all.
Is that even possible? It absolutely is.
From Days to Minutes
Thanks to today’s modern cloud and virtualization technologies, CUProdigy is able to offer a solution that all but bridges the gap between disaster recovery and high availability. In our DRaaS environment, your data is replicated in real time to virtual servers in one of our hardened, state-of-the-art data centers. If your primary server fails for any reason, the server at our data center is instantly available for your use. Your RTO is literally reduced to a couple of minutes. Most members, and even most employees, won’t even realize that there was a hiccup.
Think about that. What used to cost you three miserable days can now be resolved in a couple of minutes. But that’s the nature of technology. It’s the dial-up modem versus the cable modem, the floppy diskette versus the solid-state terabyte disc. And like most other computer services, as a delivery model, the cloud is always less expensive.
However, the truly amazing part is what these leaps in technology mean to your employees and your members. Both groups expect your IT systems to be there when they need them. When you start looking at disasters in terms of availability instead of recovery, leveraging the latest cloud and virtualization technologies, you truly can bridge the gap between DR and HA.
Xerex Bueno is chief technology officer with CUProdigy.