Consolidation of Disaster Recovery Replica Servers

Transcription

1 Consolidation of Disaster Recovery Replica Servers WANSync and Virtual Server Technologies January Trapelo Road Waltham, MA WANSync

2 Contents The Value Proposition... 1 Description of the Solution... 2 Example Scenarios... 4 Implementing the Solution... 7 Other XOsoft Products... 7 Contact Information... 7

3 The Value Proposition Achieve significant cost savings through consolidation of disaster recovery servers by combining the award-winning disaster protection of XOsoft s WANSync with the latest virtual server technologies from Microsoft and EMC. Consolidating disaster recovery servers on virtual machines can yield both reduced hardware costs and significantly lessened management burden.

4 Description of the Solution Disaster recovery and business continuance capabilities are increasingly critical for businesses today. According to a study by accounting firm McGladrey and Pullen, 43% of companies that experience a disaster never re-open and 29% close within two years. Of those that do manage to survive, the long-term financial impact can be tremendous. As Figure 1 illustrates for publicly traded companies, an organization that does not respond effectively to a crisis faces a double penalty in the direct impact of the crisis and in a subsequent crisis of confidence by investors. Figure 1: Impact of corporate crisis response on shareholder value Page 2

5 Costs of Business Continuance Capability At the same time, two dynamics are driving up the total cost of maintaining an adequate business continuance capability. The first dynamic is the ever-growing numbers of IT-based business processes that are candidates for disaster recovery protection. For example, communication and collaboration systems like , IP telephony, instant messaging and web portals are becoming increasingly central to revenue-generating business operations, even as increasing numbers of core business processes are becoming IT-based and driving growth in mission-critical database and web servers. Further, the need for redundancy to achieve performance goals, provide fault tolerance, and enable business continuance in the face of disasters is leading to significantly increased numbers of servers that must be managed. The second dynamic arises from the fact that the complexity of management increases nonlinearly with the total number of systems. Each new server represents not just one additional unit of management work, but introduces from a few to many new interactions within the environment that must be tracked, understood, and managed. To make things worse, much of this proliferation of systems is not only complex, but is wasteful as well. The typical utilization of an Intel-based server is in the range of 5% - 15%. Even accounting for peak demand times, a huge percentage of server hardware, server software, and worst of all, server maintenance and management effort is wasted. A December 2004 Gartner Research report has stated that through 2007, organizations with more than 200 servers will waste between $500,000 and $720,000 annually supporting underutilized application/server combinations. Server Consolidation Server consolidation has become an accepted methodology for both increasing capacity utilization and decreasing management cost. In a December 2003 survey at its annual Data Center Conference, Gartner found that well over 90% of participants planned to undertake a server consolidation effort; two thirds already had projects underway. Server consolidation can provide direct reductions in hardware costs, but can also generate significant management cost savings and yield additional benefits in improved ability to manage security and availability. Consolidation of systems for DR and business continuance purposes is something of a special case. On the one hand, to provide effective business continuance capabilities while keeping management complexity under control, DR replica systems must match production systems one to one. On the other hand, as systems intended solely to provide backup for production systems, utilization is typically extremely low. While it is not difficult to justify complete duplication of a few key mission-critical servers, applications and data, it is far less obvious when DR protection of the next tier of applications requires duplicating dozens or even hundreds of servers. Enter the virtual machine. Virtualization solutions like Microsoft s Virtual Server 2005 and EMC s VMWare introduce an abstraction layer that insulate the BIOS, operating systems and applications on Intel architectures from the physical hardware so that multiple virtual machines, with Page 3

6 heterogeneous operating systems, can all run simultaneously on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine, or VM, sees its own consistent, normalized set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded, as illustrated in Figure 2. Figure 2. Standard versus virtualized servers The use of VM technology to consolidate Intel-based servers has exploded over the last couple years. The reason is simple. According to a 2003 Gartner report, Enterprises that do not leverage virtualization technologies will spend 25% more annually for hardware, software, labor and space for x86-based servers. In fact, given the particular requirements of DR servers, virtualization technology can easily reduce TCO by 50% or more through a combination of hardware savings and savings in a variety of IT tasks like upgrading and monitoring servers. Example Scenarios Figures 3a-c illustrate the power of combining virtual machine technology and highavailability software like WANSyncHA. Each of the figures shows a production site on the left, in San Francisco, and a secondary DR site across the country in New York, with production data being replicated over the WAN. The New York site could be a dedicated DR facility or simply another office of the same company. Figure 3a illustrates the simplest case: two servers at the production facility, one running Microsoft SQL Server and a second one running Oracle, are replicated to two virtual servers running on a single physical server at the DR site. The OS and application configurations on the production and virtual machines are identical, but the use of virtual server technology has saved the extra physical hardware. Page 4

7 Figure 3a. Basic DR virtualization Figure 3b illustrates a slightly more complicated situation. In this case, the production facility is running its Exchange application on a two-server Microsoft cluster as well as a standalone file server. It is of course possible to replicate the cluster to a standalone server, however, if the DR facility is expected to support production usage for an extended period in the event of a disaster, providing cluster capability there as well can make sense. It is also possible to run multiple cluster nodes as virtual servers on a single physical one, but this would eliminate most of the value of running a cluster on the DR site at all. So, in this case, two physical servers are used to contain the two cluster nodes at the DR site, and we are still able to consolidate a DR file server on one of them for some savings. Figure 3c illustrates the real power of DR server consolidation using virtual server technology, simply by scaling up exactly the same usages that are shown in the first two figures. In this case, the production site is running 11 different applications on 14 physical servers, with three of the particularly critical applications running on clusters to increase availability. With powerful servers at the DR site, it is reasonable to run 4-5 applications per server, particularly since each of the servers is running one passive node of a cluster during normal operation. With the proper distribution of applications, we are able to provide DR capability for 14 physical production servers on only 3 physical DR servers and still offer clustering on the DR site with each cluster pair split across physically separate servers! Page 5

8 Figure 3b. DR virtualization of clusters Figure 3c. The full power of virtualization Page 6

9 Implementing the Solution From the standpoint of WANSync and WANSyncHA, virtual servers are no different than physical servers. As long as the servers are running supported versions of the applications and operating systems, XOsoft software installs and runs identically on virtual and physical servers. WANSync and WANSyncHA have been thoroughly tested both on Virtual Server 2005 and on both the GSX and ESX versions of VMWare. Other XOsoft Products XOsoft offers several other products to protect access to your critical data and applications, as well as to add value through fast and completely flexible content delivery. Please check out our website or contact a XOsoft representative for more information. WANSync for Disaster Recovery WANSync for Content Delivery Enterprise Rewinder A 14 day trial evaluation of the software is available for download at: Contact Information North America (1.866.WANSync) International Headquarters New York West Coast Israel 1601 Trapelo Road Waltham, MA th floor 250 West 34th Street New York, NY Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA Menahem Begin Ave. P.O. Box 31 Beit Dagan 50250, Israel Tel: Fax: Tel: Fax: Tel: Fax: Tel: Fax: Tinfo@xosoft.comT Web: Thttp:// Page 7