RackWare Solutions Disaster Recovery

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1 RackWare Solutions Disaster Recovery

2 RackWare Solutions Disaster Recovery Overview Business Continuance via Disaster Recovery is an essential element of IT and takes on many forms. The high end consists of high availability solutions that provide real-time replication of systems. While these systems provide seamless continuity during outages they are large, complex, and expensive, justifiable to support only the most critical business applications. At the other end of the continuum, however, Disaster Recovery is little more than tape backup or backup to NAS which have complicated and lengthy restore procedures which take hours or days. A major improvement can be made in disaster recovery with a solution that provides business continuity in a model that simply extends the existing IT architecture into the Cloud. With the introduction of virtualization and, in particular, the cloud, many architecture elements that make those technologies successful seem well suited to building an economical DR solution. For this class of DR, datacenters should not have to carry the burden of deploying identical hardware or hypervisors at a DR site. Image mobility must support heterogeneity, being able to move Images among disparate hardware as well as hypervisors. Platform agnostic mobility is important not only when the computing trigger is shifted to the remote site, but it s also important to support easy mobility back to the origin site to resume normal operations. Beyond mobility, a policy architecture needs to be in place to automate processes and make intelligent decisions about workload operations.

3 How RackWare s DR Solution Works RackWare Management Module (RMM) provides a Disaster Recovery solution that builds on its Image mobility and elasticity features to bring economic Disaster Recovery to Enterprises. The building blocks of RackWare s DR solution include Onboarding, Cloud Bursting, and the Policy Framework to automate necessary functions. Captured Images from production (origin) instances are cloned and pushed out to a local or remote DR site. Changes in production images are periodically synchronized with the remote images, keeping the original Host Image and the DR image in sync. In the event of an outage at the origin site, the up to date Image at the DR site can assume operations through RackWare s fail-over mechanism. This provides significantly improved DR support over traditional tape or hard-disk backup, which would require hours or days to restore after the production systems operating system, applications, and data have been repaired. RackWare s DR solution provides failover at a fraction of the cost of a fully replicated datacenter architected for high availability or clustering technologies. Setting up a DR Image utilizes the basic fundamentals of RMM, beginning with capturing the origin Host. Then a clone of the Image is made, cloudified, and deployed at the desired cloud location. The resulting recovery Cloud Image does not need to be running continuously, and is only launched only during synchronization operations. Initial Cloning of Origin Instance into the Cloud OS, Apps, Data The origin Host Image can reside in remote storage (at the origin site) or on the local disk. If the Image resides on the local disk, the RMM configures the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on the Host and is used to take periodic snapshots of the Image. If the Image resides remotely, LVM is not required, and a snapshot operation is executed on the Image via the storage array management interface. In the background, an Image sync operation synchronizes any changes in the Image with the Image at the DR site.

4 Changes on Origin are Kept Synchronized with Recovery User Conected to Origin Instance OS, Apps, Data Overhead on the origin Host is extremely small involving only resources to take a delta snapshot. Thus the data overhead of the WAN link incurs only the delta of information, keeping bandwidth needs and sync time to a minimum. It s important that Image updates include user data, Operating System updates, and application installations and configuration changes so that the recovery image behaves exactly like the production image should a failover occur. The cloud DR feature supports all of these. While OS updates are more infrequent it is still important to ensure that kernel patches are kept in sync with the DR Image. When updating the OS, an image refresh operation is done from the RMM first before the sync to the CloudImage. Should the production system be compromised or inoperable, the CloudImage is automatically launched and is running with the latest synchronized changes. Failover to DOWN User Conected to After the production instance is repaired and operational, it s easy to restore the origin site to any up any changes made to the CloudImage in the cloud. When the origin site is restored to its operational state, the administrator can utilize the capture from cloud feature to refresh the original Image and synchronize any changes that occurred during the outage.

5 Failback to Origin Instance User Re-conected to Origin Instance OS, Apps, Data Syncing from Recovery to Origin RackWare offers a DR solution that provides failover and failback capabilities of expensive replication systems at a fraction of the cost. To find out more, please visit www. rackwareinc.com and request a free demonstration. About RackWare RackWare brings intelligence and automation to the cloud, providing greater availability for enterprises, greater flexibility for enterprise IT users, and reduced costs for enterprise IT providers. Computing resources physical, virtual, and cloud machines can be easily and automatically scaled up or down as demand fluctuates. On average, RackWare customers realize a cost savings of 40 to 50 percent, while getting the highest performance and availability out of their cloud. RackWare was founded in 2009 and is based in Santa Clara, California. Phone: info@rackwareinc.com Web: Copyright RackWare Inc. All rights reserved.