Protecting Your Production Document Output From Catastrophe

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Protecting Your Production Document Output From Catastrophe"

Cori Francis
8 years ago
Views:

1 WHITE PAPER DOM Disaster Recovery June 2013 Protecting Your Production Document Output From Catastrophe Delivering Performance

2 Contents 3 3 Solutions 3 Benefits Reinstall or Image Backup 5 Standby Failover 6 Active Failover

3 Unplanned IT downtime is a very expensive problem for today s businesses. Implementing a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for critical business functions is essential for your organization. As production document output workloads support critical elements of your business operations, your DR plan should include a solution for maintaining production document output functionality. disaster: a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction Solutions Quadrant Software s virtual Document Output Management solution, QuadraDocV5, provides three disaster recovery solutions. Options range from a no-cost virtual image backup solution to an automatic, multi-site document output server workload transition solution with virtually no downtime. Benefits By implementing a Disaster Recovery plan for your Document Output Management system, your organization will save time and money by reducing DOM downtime and ensure SOX compliance. -Webster

4 1 A Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for critical business functions is essential for your business. Each year in the US, unplanned IT downtime results in billions of dollars in lost revenue. 1 According to Aberdeen Group, the average US organization experiences 2.3 hours of IT downtime per year, costing more than $181K per hour (see table below). hour of IT downtime costs an average of $181K2 Disaster to your mission-critical data can be triggered by a wide range of events, such as weather, human error, or cyber- attack. It is essential for your company to have a DR recovery plan in place that will provide the insurance needed to protect your data, as well as minimize the downtime for mission critical systems when a disaster occurs. It s easy to recognize the most prominent elements of your technical infrastructure that require DR planning, such as your company s website, CRM tool, or databases. But what about less obvious systems, like your Document Output Management (DOM) system, which faxes, s and files your mission critical documents? Is your DOM system part of your DR plan? DOM systems are sometimes overlooked when considering a disaster recovery plan, but loss of DOM functionality can result in substantial losses during a disaster.

5 QDV5 offers 3 levels of disaster recovery Quadrant Software s virtual Document Output Management solution, QuadraDocV5 (QDV5), provides disaster recovery functionality for your production document delivery workloads. QDV5 provides three levels of recovery configurations available using basic functionality, ranging from no-cost to a premium, multi-site solution. While both VMware and Hyper-V offer advanced replication tools and techniques, QDV5 provides the same or better functionality at an application level relieving customers from the expense and effort needed to understand and implement advanced VM functionality. The next three sections will discuss how QDV5 customers can implement these Disaster Recovery features. 1) Reinstall or Image Backup As a virtual server, the most obvious disaster recovery solution type for QDV5 involves either reinstallation or virtual image backup. This technique provides the lowest upfront cost, but bears the most risk for longer downtime. Both options require contacting Quadrant Software for temporary keys. 1.1) Reinstall QDV5 QDV5 customers can use this approach to dealing with a server failure that impacts a QDV5 virtual instance. This recovery technique requires using product media to install a fresh copy of the application on a functioning server. Once the QDV5 server is installed and authorized, it must be configured and then updated with a database refresh and the server will be ready for productive use.

6 Reinstall or Image Backup Recovery Score 1.2) Virtual Image Snapshot An alternative to a basic QDV5 recovery is to use the features available in VM management to capture snapshots of the QDV5 server. These snapshots will tie up some disk space, but will save valuable time in the recovery process. To recover using a snapshot technique, you must access the snapshot you made and load into a VM manager. Once loaded, the instance may be powered up and brought online. After the QDV5 server is authorized, it must be updated with a database refresh, which can take several hours in some cases. Lowest Risk Lowest Cost Automatic Process Production Uptime 2) Standby Failover As computer rooms and networks become larger, more complex, and more distributed the difficulty of recovery increases. In a recovery situation, you ll have many resources to deal with in a short timeframe and any simplification in recovery is highly desirable. Quadrant Software offers an affordable answer to this recovery need with the QDV5 Standby solution. This solution streamlines resumption of document output capabilities when the pressure of a recovery is on your team and time is of the essence.

7 Standby Failover Recovery Score The QDV5 Standby system provides a fully operational second QDV5 instance that is constantly updated with the data from your active instance. The failover is fully configured and ready to be pressed into service at any time. WAN installations with multiple data centers or computer rooms may leverage a higher level of redundancy by locating the QDV5 Standby server in a second location. Lowest Risk Lowest Cost Automatic Process Production Uptime There is a simple promotion of the Standby QDV5 server when any sort of event occurs that may impact your production QDV5 server. The promotion of the Standby QDV5 server does not require in-depth knowledge of either QDV5 or your VM infrastructure and can be completed in less than ten minutes. No lengthy database refresh is required. It is suggested that customers practice steps involved with promoting their Standby QDV5 server to absorb the productive workload occasionally to ensure that there is familiarity with all tasks involved. Contact Quadrant Software Tech Support for detailed steps to promote or demote your QDV5 Standby server in your location or contact your Quadrant Software customer representative if you do not have this solution yet.

8 Active Failover Recovery Score Lowest Risk Lowest Cost 3) Active Failover Customers that want the flexibility and simplicity of the Standby Failover but also want to be able to take advantage of the resources of the second QDV5 server should consider Quadrant Software s premium DR option, the Active failover solution. The Active failover permits customers to fully leverage all ports in all of the servers involved in the recovery solution during day-to-day business. Making all ports available offers a high level of bandwidth during normal operations and permits efficient assignment of ports to send, receive, or send and receive duty. In the event of a loss of the main QDV5 server, one of the other active QDV5 servers may be promoted to the role of the main QDV5 server. QDV5 servers may be located anywhere in the WAN and physical separation is recommended to strengthen the reliability in the event a site becomes unavailable for any reason. Automatic Process Production Uptime As with the Standby Failover option, there is a simple promotion of any QDV5 server to the main QDV5 role when any sort of event occurs that may impact the main QDV5 server. No lengthy database refresh is required.

9 Disaster Recovery plans can be as extensive or narrow as you make them. Though safeguarding your entire IT infrastructure is recommended, you can save time and money by targeting specific aspects of your business to prepare for a disaster. An unexpected tragedy has potential to harm your entire business. Instituting a DR plan that can save even one facet of your business can save money and speed up comprehensive recovery. An additional consideration is Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. SOX 2002 established significant penalties for some companies that do not have an effective disaster recovery plan implemented. SOX regulations can affect how data is handled and stored onsite, in remote IT processing centers, and in offsite backups. Finally, Disaster Recovery is becoming easier every year with the advancements and availability of virtualization. Preparing a DR plan by building it over a virtualized environment will save money on the DR system as well as everyday business costs. Disasters affecting your Document Output Management system can significantly cost your organization. Therefore, you should set up a Disaster Recovery plan for your Document Output Management system. QDV5 supports multiple levels of Document Output Management Disaster Recovery protection designed to reduce your downtime and save your organization money. If you would like more information on setting up a Disaster Recovery plan for your Document Output Management system, contact Quadrant Software at or sales@quadrantsoftware.com.

10 About Quadrant Software Quadrant Software is the leading provider of Document Output Management (DOM) solutions for the IBM i (iseries) enterprise. Our success can be attributed to the quality and reliability of our software products and the technical expertise of our employees. We provide superior customer service, focus on quality and excellence in everything, and commit ourselves 100% to our responsibilities as an employer and corporate citizen. 1 Information Week, billion-in-lost-re/ Aberdeen Group, Datacenter Downtime: How Much Does It Really Cost?, Stratus/Files/Library/AnalystReports/AberdeenDatacenterDowntimeCost.pdf

Everything You Need to Know About Network Failover

Everything You Need to Know About Network Failover Worry-Proof Internet 2800 Campus Drive Suite 140 Plymouth, MN 55441 Phone (763) 694-9949 Toll Free (800) 669-6242 Overview Everything You Need to Know