White Paper. Using Universal Platform TM to Facilitate Disaster Recovery Projects

Transcription

1 White Paper Using Universal Platform TM to Facilitate Disaster Recovery Projects

2 Page 2 of 9 Common challenges faced by companies during a Disaster Recovery project Controlling and brokering access to multiple systems and applications. Obfuscating privileged security credentials from end users and third-party contractors. Co-ordinating multiple complex tasks and activities across disparate systems. Maintaining information integrity and consistency between different systems. Automating repetitive tasks. Maintaining a consistent and up-to-date single source of truth. Keeping production and disaster recovery environments, plans and information in sync. Auditing activities. The following example scenario describes how Universal Platform TM can help an organisation address these challenges. The Example Scenario Organisation A is a large multi-national e-commerce provider with a significant investment in infrastructure that is distributed across multiple geographically dispersed data centers. Many multi-tier proprietary applications are hosted across these environments. The production environment runs 24x7 and is the organisation s primary revenue source. The environment is mission-critical and therefore requires a solid disaster

3 Page 3 of 9 recovery plan to be in place. Due to the specialised and complicated nature of implementing a functioning Disaster Recovery Plan, an outsourced approach is used. Stage 1: Core IT The first stage of the project is to address the recoverability of the Core IT assets identified as critical to the organisation s continued operations. Due to regulatory requirements, these core assets are required to be recovered in the organisation s dedicated disaster recovery facility. And due to the extremely high cost of a dedicated facility, the list of Core IT assets is kept to a minimum.

4 Page 4 of 9 The Role of Universal Platform TM There are a number of valid reasons why organisations should remain free to choose best-of-breed technologies to deliver the needs of their specific requirements, such as replicating information between data centers. Organisation A should be free to choose the most appropriate technology stack to achieve this. Universal Platform TM s role in this scenario is to glue the systems together, ensure information consistency across multiple platforms, broker security access to a number of different platforms with different security credentials, and automate the recovery process. This is best explained using the illustrated example: Security Context Information Bus WorkFlows Connectors Security Context Universal Platform TM acting as a Security and Systems broker

5 Page 5 of 9 Example: Provisioning the Resources in order to perform Disaster Recovery Testing Universal Platform TM provides the organisation with a mechanism to separate the security credentials that are provided to a third-party from that of the primary systems and APIs. This allows the organisation to create a credential with tailored access to the underlying extensions, that Universal Platform TM interfaces with, and provides specific rights to the account. Most organisations have multiple separate systems that require separate security credentials. In this scenario, security credentials are created for each of the underlying systems to perform the required disaster recovery tasks. The system credentials are obfuscated from the end-user who can only perform the certain actions that they are specifically granted permissions to. High level sequence of events to perform Recovery Testing for a specific application with a number of complex dependencies Select the system or application to recover. Universal Platform provides multiple interface options including an SDK, that can be used to extend functionality. Query Configuration Management Database for Application Configuration and associated dependencies. In this case, utilising the BMC Java API, Universal Platform TM can query the CMDB for settings, such as the configuration items that make up a particular configuration, the associated machine names and applications running on each of the systems. Check for available resources such as Network Addresses and Machine Names. For legacy reasons, the organisation maintains internal and external public IP address information and the associated URLs and DNS entrie,s in a proprietary system using MySQL as its database engine. Universal Platform TM ships with a number of database connectors, including MySQL, that provides out-of-the-box functionality for the organisation to perform the necessary queries and allocation of these resources. Write DR system/application configuration to a Configuration Management Database ( CMDB ). Keeping the CMDB as the single source of truth in the enterprise is paramount for its effective use. With the necessary information gathered from the various systems, Universal Platform TM ensures the CMDB remains the single point of truth (SPOT) and pushes the correct information to the systems. Kick off provisioning process of resources in the disaster recovery facility. Leveraging the VMware vsphere API, Universal Platform TM can send SOAP encoded WSDL files to

6 Page 6 of 9 vsphere to provision, manage, monitor and control the life-cycle of all components that comprise a virtual infrastructure. Using Universal Platform TM as the broker the required resources are provisioned in this manner. As an example, to not disrupt the production environment for DR testing purposes, a clone of the production database is created using the vsphere API. Universal Platform TM is not constrained to VMware and can be used with any system that provides a functional API. In a similar manner, Universal Platform TM provisions the resources - load balanced pools and the public IP addresses, on the F5 load balancer. F5 load balancers have icontrol. icontrol is a web services-based API that allows complete, dynamic, programmatic control of F5 configuration objects. Add new systems to correct group in Microsoft Active Directory. The number of systems to be recovered as part of a DR exercise for a large organisation can sometimes number 100 s or 1000 s. Universal Platform TM s LDAP integration allows for automating the task of adding the newly created computers to the correct group in Active Directory. Create an entry in a proprietary operations dashboard. The final step in this example process is to add the newly generated information to an IT operations dashboard, that the organisation s support team uses. By utlising Universal Platform TM, the information contained in the dashboard can be kept up to date with the appropriate SPOT identified and defined in Universal Platform TM.

7 Page 7 of 9 Stage 2: Extension into the Cloud The evolution of this disaster recovery solution, once the Core IT services are adequately covered, is to extend this to the less critical, non-regulated IT resources. Keeping costs low and the use of elastic resources lends itself well to cloud providers such as Amazon AWS. It is relevant to acknowledge that this is not limited to secondary services. In fact in some cases, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions can provide a better solution than having a second physical site dedicated for the purposes of disaster recovery. Some organisations are simply more comfortable having a dedicated site or are forced to do so by regulatory requirements. To leverage elastic resources and the low cost of cloud resources, the organisation chooses to extend the second stage of the disaster recovery solution into the Amazon AWS cloud. Simplification of Secondary Resources to Cloud

8 Page 8 of 9 As per the Stage 1 solution, the organisation is free to choose the best-of-breed technologies to facilitate the DR process into AWS. In this example scenario it is feasible to expect the organisation to leverage a number of AWS based technologies to achieve this. As an example, the organisation may choose to Direct Connect their production environment with Amazon AWS. This would allow for a dedicated network connection from the premises that in many cases reduces the network costs, increases bandwidth throughput and provides a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. The organisation could also make use of the AWS Storage Gateway to mirror the production environment into AWS. The AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organisation s on-premises IT environment and AWS s storage infrastructure. The service allows organistations to securely store data in the AWS cloud for scalable, resilient and cost-effective storage. The AWS Storage Gateway supports industry-standard storage protocols that work with an organistation s existing applications. The role of Universal Platform TM Extending the above solution into Amazon AWS is a simple process with Universal Platform TM. The nature of Universal Platform TM is such that the actions carried out by the platform are abstracted, or loosely coupled, from the underlying connectors and systems. What this means is that it allows for flexibility for the organisation to add or remove connectors to the platform as they see fit. There is no need to re-architect the entire solution and re-integrate the required systems again. In the above scenario, the organisation has already done the challenging pieces of work by integrating and co-ordinating activities across multiple separate systems and platforms. The addition of AWS requires the addition of a single connector to enable AWS to become an integrated element of the disaster recovery eco-system. AWS provides a web based API into all of the services that they provide and in the context of this disaster recovery solution, AWS and the on-premises Vmware activities become transparent to the end-user. Universal Platform TM does the hard work.

9 Page 9 of 9 Stage 3: Free to do vnext Universal Platform TM allows the organisation to determine its own technological portfolio. The extension of their disaster recovery strategy and the degree that they want to make use of a particular technology or set of technologies, to improve their recovery point objective (RPO) or recovery time objective (RTO), is completely under their control. The extensibility of Universal Platform TM facilitates the brokering of varied systems for varied functions by using extensions and connectors. There are many pre-built connectors that the organisation can make use of, or if required a connector can easily develop extensions to fulfill specific needs. It is most likely that as the economic value of cloud providers increase, organisations such as Organisation A will need to take advantage of the cloud to remain competitive. Universal Platform TM provides the capability to realise this. Further Information For more information, please see: