You're a smart IT professional. You manage your servers, network, and applications with the right level of due diligence. You respond to customer requests within acceptable timelines. You always back up your data. You've probably even negotiated a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your business, codifying the maximum acceptable level of downtime and setting the standard for which services need added attention.
You've done everything right, and as a result, you've protected your business from the threat of data loss. That's an important milestone, but it really solves only one part of the problem. Ensuring the safety of your business' data protects its intellectual property, but that data is effectively worthless without the applications that make use of it.
A business' worst‐case scenario often arrives through a data center‐impacting incident. The cause for that incident can range from a simple disruption to a major outage on up through the catastrophic losses caused through a natural disaster. Yet while the damage done by an interruption in data center operations ranges in severity, the net result to your users is the same: They can't do their jobs.
A further study by McGladrey and Pullen showed that 43% of companies who experience a disaster will never recover. The major functional difference between those that survive and those that don't has to do with how fast their IT can swing itself back into operations. In short, your planning must prepare and compensate for all types of interruptions, from the outwardly benign to the completely devastating.
Consider for a moment the types of data in your organization today. Some data is generally processed through client applications; for example, a Microsoft Word document requires Microsoft Word to view or edit its contents. Other types of data require no specialized application whatsoever for their processing, being able to work with essentially any application on any desktop or server. Other types of data require the presence of server resources for their processing, such as a server application, a database, or both.
From a high‐level perspective, these different types of data can be functionally broken down into four categories:
The effective IT organization recognizes that this separation in data exists. Such organizations are responsible for its safety and security as well as its non‐interrupted availability. With backup and restore solutions being relatively mature—tape backups, disk‐to‐disk solutions, continuous data protection technologies—it can be argued that essentially all IT organizations do a good job with data backups.
Yet herein lies the problem: Most IT organizations focus on data as if all data were raw. IT organizations with solid backups and offsite replication can and do successfully ensure their data will survive through disasters both large and small; however, no backup solution alone can fully preserve that data's accessibility without also considering its needed applications.
Does your organization currently consider the role of applications in its planning for disaster recovery? How about for comparatively minor service interruptions? If you have an SLA in place that codifies your IT organization's Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), is that number scoped to include your users' ability to process the data?
The peril of application downtime relates strongly to the capability for your IT organization to maintain a functional percentage of total services during the period of a service interruption. Most organizations recognize that keeping every service up and operational isn't feasible when their "major outage" light turns from green to red. Most recognize that key businesses services must be brought back online quickly for the business to continue as a business.
Yet there's a technological problem native to applications and their preservation during service interruptions. Unlike data, which tends to be static while at rest, the applications that process data are constantly processing and constantly changing. Thus, traditional backup solutions must evolve to support the real‐time needs of applications and their internal data processing. These solutions must work with each server's individual operating system (OS) to recognize when changes have been made and replicate those changes to a backup host.
Further, today's business needs mean that today's technologies must evolve past the idea of "tape drive as primary backup solution." The tape backups of yesteryear were successful in gathering an emergency copy of critical data to protect against accidental loss and ensure long‐term archival. But large‐scale tape restorations such as the kind that occur after a major service interruption or disaster can require hours, if not days, to complete. If the loss of a single terabyte of critical data requires 3 days to restore, this solution involves a risk to your business operations.
As a result, alternative technologies are necessary that enable the rapid and real‐time failover of business‐critical data to alternative locations. At the same time, these same solutions enable the failover of that data's applications. Technologies exist today that enable the smart business to inexpensively and cohesively failover every aspect of their data processing to alternative sites. The result is the elimination of downtime associated with all kinds of interruptive events, from simple power outages all the way to catastrophic disasters. In the next article of this series, I'll focus on just those solutions, helping you understand exactly how these solutions work and where they might fit into your overall data protection portfolio.