DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE - SERVICE DEFINITION

Transcription

1 DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE - SERVICE DEFINITION Provided in response to the Government Procurement Service G- Cloud Services III Procurement Vehicle Invitation to Tender Reference RM1557/iii 2013 Novosco Ltd. All Rights Reserved

2 Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary Benefits of CloudStream DR as a Service Service Definition Architecture Overview of the CloudStream Disaster Recovery as a Service Product Features Functional Description VRGs Replication WAN Optimisation WAN Resilience VMware Feature Support Lot 1 Disaster Recovery as a Service - Example Use Cases Novosco Accreditations Information Assurance Details of the Level of Backup/Restore and Disaster Recovery That Will Be Provided VM consistency Testing Failover Deciding to failover Customer initiated failover Novosco initiated failover Failback On-Boarding and Off-Boarding Process/Scope Service Management Details Service Constraints Service Levels Financial recompense model for not meeting service levels Training Ordering and invoicing process Termination terms Data Restoration / Service Migration Consumer Responsibilities Technical Requirements Details of any trial service available Commercial in Confidence 1

3 2.20 Data Extraction/Removal Data Standards Commitment to returning all consumer generated data Formats / standards into which data will be extracted Price for extraction of consumer generated data Confirmation that the Supplier will destroy Consumer generated data Data Storage and Processing Locations Deployment Models Service Models Burst v. Elastic Resources Guaranteed and Non-Guaranteed Resources Persistence of Storage Service Provisioning Utilisation Monitoring/Reporting Data Centre(s) Network Use By Other Suppliers Standard Configurations Service Roadmaps PaaS Types Pricing About Novosco Commercial in Confidence 2

4 1 Executive Summary Many organisations find that internal Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions are creating an additional financial and personnel resource burden on the constrained ICT budgets. This is particularly acute when internal DR solutions are due for refresh. Even with regular disaster recovery testing, many organisations doubt their ability to be able to fully recover data and applications following a serious ICT outage. The Novosco CloudStream Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution addresses these common issues by providing a resilient, cost effective, managed service that removes the complexity and overheads of running an internal DR service. The Novosco CloudStream DRaaS solution provides an off-site compute and storage infrastructure service, providing support for the leading industry operating systems and broad enterprise application support. With smart data replication and efficient WAN usage, the Novosco CloudStream DRaaS solution provides reliable and cost effective DR for your ICT infrastructure. Delivered via an ITIL aligned Service Desk, the solution is a proven, simple, and affordable pay as you go service. 1.1 Benefits of CloudStream DR as a Service Benefit Justification Cost Reduction Managed Service Support Flexibility This solution is based on a consumption based model that does not require investment in hardware, software, licensing or extensive training. Simply pay for what you use. We monitor, manage, and support the entire DRaaS infrastructure on your behalf to some of the highest service levels in the industry Customers have the ability to perform full test restores at will without impact on production systems. Commercial in Confidence 3

5 2 Service Definition 2.1 Architecture Overview of the CloudStream Disaster Recovery as a Service CloudStream DRaaS is a solution designed to provide a managed DR capability to customers with vsphere environments. Figure 1: CloudStream DRaaS Overview The DR Service provides an on-going replication solution for customer virtual machines to a Novosco DR data centre. Novosco install a management service per Virtual Centre and deploy a replication appliance on each vsphere host which is running the customer virtual machines. Virtual Replication Groups (VRGs) are configured and maintained by Novosco. Virtual machines in a VRG will continuously replicate asynchronously to the DR site. Commercial in Confidence 4

6 2.2 Product Features The CloudStream DRaaS solution provides a capability for customer specified virtual machines protected under this service to be recovered in our hosted environment. The solution is fully managed covering the following areas: Hardware monitoring and replacement at the DR site; Software (which enables the service) installation, configuration and updates at customer site(s); Providing standard network configuration options to cover the live and test failover scenarios; Virtual Machine replication configuration as per the customer s instructions; DR system performance monitoring; Activity reporting; Fault logging; Hardware agnostic so that replication works independently of storage array vendor; and Customer ability to initiate a full test restore on demand, without production impact. 2.3 Functional Description The CloudStream DRaaS solution provides an on-going replication solution for nominated customer virtual machines to a Novosco DR data centre. Novosco install a management service per Virtual Centre and deploy a replication appliance on each vsphere host which can be running the nominated virtual machines. Virtual Replication Groups (VRGs) are configured and maintained only by Novosco. Virtual machines in a VRG will continuously replicate asynchronously to the DR site VRGs VRGs are the smallest unit of management in the solution. A VRG can be failed over in its entirety only; it cannot be partially failed over. Furthermore all machines in the group are recovered to the same point in time that you choose. VRGs should be aligned by the services running on the VMs within the group and then defined by RPO, priority and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) history Replication Writes are captured by the Virtual Replication software in the hypervisor level, before they are written to the physical disk at the protected site. These writes are sent to the recovery site asynchronously, thus avoiding long distance replication latency to the production applications. Commercial in Confidence 5

7 2.3.3 WAN Optimisation Using compression to minimise bandwidth and other techniques such as throttling to prioritise network traffic to reduce the impact on day-to-day operations, Novosco can make sure that the communication between the protected and recovery sites is fully optimised. Virtual Replication also uses signature matching to reduce the amount of data sent across the WAN. During synchronisation of the protected site and recovery site for every virtual machine in a VPG, Virtual Replication maintains a map of disk sectors so that in the case when there is a need to resynchronise sites, the map signatures can be used to ensure that only data where changes occurred are passed over the WAN WAN Resilience Virtual Replication is highly resilient to WAN interruptions. In order to reduce storage overhead used for replication purposes, on WAN failure Virtual Replication starts to maintain a smart bitmap in memory, in which it tracks and records the storage areas that changed. Since the bitmap is kept in memory, Virtual Replication does not require any LUN or volume per VPG at the source side. Once the WAN connection resumes, Virtual Replication uses this bitmap to check whether there were updates to the source disks and if there were updates to the disks, these updates are sent to the recovery site VMware Feature Support VMware Snapshots/VM level Restores If the protected virtual machines are updated such that they are no longer synchronised with their mirror machines in the recovery site, you can force the resynchronisation of the machines. An example of when the machines can be out-of-sync is when there is a rollback of a virtual machine to a VMware snapshot. In this case, the recovery virtual machine will include changes that have been rolled back in the protected machine, so that they are no longer synchronised. You can force the synchronisation of the machines in a VPG to remedy this type of situation VMware Clusters VMware Clusters are supported including HA and DRS with the following notes: Each host in the cluster must have a VRA installed; You cannot apply HA or DRS to a VRA Host Affinity rules and CPU pinning VMware host affinity rules enable specifying which ESX/ESXi hosts a virtual machine can or cannot run under. CPU pinning ties a specific workload to a specific processor within an ESX/ Commercial in Confidence 6

8 ESXi host. Thus, when DRS is enabled, the rules for which ESX/ESXi hosts a virtual machine can be enforced regardless of the load. Virtual Replication works whether host affinity and CPU pinning is used or not. Note: Host affinity rules can be applied to Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) VMware VMotion If you use VMotion to migrate a virtual machine, which is part of a VRG, from one ESX/ESXi host to another ESX/ESXi host, make each host involved has a VRA installed. You cannot move a Virtual Replication Appliance (VRA) from one ESX/ESXi host to another VMware Host Maintenance Mode You can place a host with a VRA into maintenance mode by first putting the VRA into maintenance mode. This will be explained in the User Guide and demonstrated as part of the solution VMware Roles and Permissions Virtual Replication supplies permissions that are assigned to the Administrator role when Virtual Replication is installed that enable the administrator to perform specific actions. You can delegate permissions specific to just as you would configure VMware delegated permissions normally. Commercial in Confidence 7

9 2.4 Lot 1 Disaster Recovery as a Service - Example Use Cases 1. You do not have a site suitable for DR - avoid the capital expenditure and operational costs associated with maintaining a site for DR; 2. Insufficient infrastructure at an existing DR site as your requirements have changed - leverage CloudStream DRaaS as a partial or complete DR solution; 3. Your DR infrastructure is due a refresh but you do not have capital budget to replace - CloudStream DRaaS allows you to operationalise your DR costs in a pay-what-you-need model; 4. Staff Training - You would prefer to not have to train or recruit staff to subject matter expert level on a bespoke in house DR configuration. Take advantage of Novosco s DR SMEs, their standard operational model and focus your team on how to perform recovery of your applications; 5. Operational Support - Time saved on monitoring/operation and troubleshooting the DR solution can instead be used to focus on more DR testing. 2.5 Novosco Accreditations Professional Accreditations Novosco is registered with ISO9001 Novosco is registered with ISO27001 Novosco is registered with the Information Commissions Office under the Data Protection Act 1998 DPA No. Z Novosco is registered with Novosco is registered with Investors in People Technical Accreditations TOGAF Enterprise Architecture Framework PRINCE2 Project Management ITIL Service Management VMware Enterprise Solution Provider Partner Cisco Premier Certified Partner Commercial in Confidence 8

10 Citrix Platinum Solution Advisor Partner EMC Velocity Signature Partner Fortinet Gold Partner Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Riverbed Certified Partner 2.6 Information Assurance Novosco operates an Information Security Management System which complies with the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001:2005. The Novosco CloudStream DRaaS is suitable for IL0 and IL1/2 data. 2.7 Details of the Level of Backup/Restore and Disaster Recovery That Will Be Provided VM consistency Every few seconds, a check point is written to the journal. These checkpoints ensure write order fidelity and crash-consistency to each checkpoint. During recovery you pick one of these crash-consistent checkpoints in the journal and recover to this point. A crash-consistent recovery point does not capture the contents of memory or any pending I/O operations - the data will be in the same state it would have been if the system had crashed at the exact moment that the checkpoint was taken. If a database system is restored to a crash consistent state, then it is necessary to follow any procedures that would be followed if the system had actually crashed at that point. Many applications have an automated recovery mechanism and will attempt to handle the problem without administrator intervention. If these automated systems aren t successful, ensure that you know what the application vendor s process is for crash recovery and be prepared to follow those steps. Improved application and data consistency can be achieved with a VSS agent Testing Failover You can test your VPG failover at any time. We recommend that you test on a quarterly basis if possible and as soon as possible after any major infrastructure changes. Commercial in Confidence 9

11 2.7.3 Deciding to failover This service provides you with the capability to failover protected workloads into our recovery site. The decision to failover is the customer s responsibility at all times. Novosco advises that your business should have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place to consider the scenarios and parameters for invoking failover Customer initiated failover The customer can initiate failover (test or live) so long as the following conditions are true: The customer VC and VM are operating without issue. The affected site has connectivity to our services If none of those conditions are true you must inform Novosco that you wish to failover. You may wish to evaluate you management services infrastructure placement with the above in mind it would be good practice to separate your management infrastructure from any shared points of failure with the VMs you are protecting Novosco initiated failover Novosco can initiate live failover if the customer cannot. Novosco requires that this activity is approved in writing and that the customer accepts full responsibility for the consequences. We will request a list of mobile telephone numbers that are authorised to approve failover. In order to request a live failover the following process is to be followed: 1. Call Novosco support to get a call logged with the failover request details. a. Novosco Support will valid the caller is allowed to request failover b. Novosco Support will log a call, record what the failover request details and provide a call ID. c. We will ask for the VPG name(s) which require failover. d. You will be asked which checkpoint is suitable for failover. e. Make a note of the call ID. 2. You will be asked to confirm you failover request by sending a SMS to a given number. 3. Upon receipt of the SMS Novosco support will start the requested failover process Failback Failback is possible but the work involved depends largely on the defining event which prompted failover in the first place. In general failback essentially involves the following steps: Create a replication relationship between the VPG in our DR site and your site. Arrange seeding from the DR site to your site if required. When the VPG enters the Protected state, the Move functionality is used to bring the workload online at your site. This involves some downtime as the VMs are Commercial in Confidence 10

12 shutdown, pending replication transactions are committed and then the VMs are powered on at your site. Enable reverse replication to automatically setup protection from your site to the DR site. The above makes a number of assumptions in order to keep this section brief and customer non-specific. One such assumption is that the original replication software installation is still in place and does not require repair/re-installation. 2.8 On-Boarding and Off-Boarding Process/Scope Novosco operate a standard on boarding procedure: The process begins upon the receipt of a valid customer order Assuming the order is a standard configuration we will proceed as follows: o Initial Novosco supplied software element installation and configuration o Provision of DR site infrastructure to match required configuration. o (per customer site) ZVM installed on nominated server. o (per customer site) ZVM registered with customer vcenter. o (per customer site) Any Novosco supplied monitoring agents / configuration. o (per customer site) Novosco configuration of VPGs as per supplied configuration. On boarding with seeding or no seeding: Without seeding: Replications are initiated without a dated copy at the destination. This is suitable for high-bandwidth WANs (typically 100Mbps or more) where it is acceptable to take several days for the initial protection to be in place and to heavily utilise the WAN connection during this time. With seeding: Replications are initiated with a dated copy at the destination. This is utilised whenever the WAN upload capability leads to an unacceptable initial sync period or when sustained heavy WAN utilisation (due to seeding) is unacceptable. This method will perform a differential on the source and destination disks and brings the destination up to date before entering a protected state. The primary benefit of seeding is reduced WAN utilisation; a lower time to reaching the protected state is secondary. The time to reach the protected state is a function of: o Source infrastructure capability (e.g. CPU speed, disk read throughput) o WAN capability (available bandwidth, latency) o DR infrastructure capability (e.g. CPU speed, disk read throughput) o This task requires engineer activity which if requested will be reflected in the service setup costs. o Present a statement of configuration for initial deployment, o Enter on-going monitoring phase. Commercial in Confidence 11

13 Off-boarding: Remove Novosco supplied software element installation Delete all replica VM disks. 2.9 Service Management Details Novosco use an ITIL aligned Service Management methodology to deliver the CloudStream DRaaS to clients. The DRaaS solution is monitored and managed proactively to identify and resolve incidents minimising any impact on client services. Clients can log service requests or incidents via the Novosco Service Desk 08:00-18:00 Mon-Fri excluding public holidays. Support outside these times is by exception only and subject to prior arrangement. The Service Desk can be contacted by phone, , or web. Novosco will produce standardised monthly reports that detail client activity and consumption of the DRaaS service Service Constraints (E.g. maintenance windows, level of customisation permitted, schedule for deprecation of functionality/features etc.) The following items are customisable subject to commercial approval and change control (only Novosco will make configuration changes): VPG membership o Boot order, boot delay o VM connected networks CDP (the standard is up to 24 hours) RPO Target VPG Replication priority Replication bandwidth limit The service is intended to be available 24/7 with the exception of planned or emergency maintenance. In either case notification will be sent to nominated individuals in accordance with the SLA. Commercial in Confidence 12

14 2.11 Service Levels 08:00 18:00 Monday-Friday for normal client operational support (for example to deploy new protected clients, changes to schedules etc.). Exceptional support can be attained through a 24/7 support route limited to the support of our infrastructure services. We can assist beyond the scope of our infrastructure on a time and materials basis Financial recompense model for not meeting service levels Service credits are not applied to this service Training Documentation will be provided on how to manage the client VMs and the failover process Ordering and invoicing process The customer should liaise with their sales contact or Account Manager within Novosco to agree the amount of resource required to complete their project. Once this has been agreed the customer should send a signed order form (in the general form of Schedule 2 of the Framework Agreement) as the method of placing Orders under the G-Cloud Catalogue. Orders can be placed by sending the completed signed Order Form to Novosco at: G-Cloud@novosco.com 2.15 Termination terms The Client may cancel the service by giving not less than four (4) weeks written notice. Commercial in Confidence 13

15 2.16 Data Restoration / Service Migration In the event that you must failover and run on our infrastructure Live then we will charge you appropriate service provider licensing (for applicable software). When choosing to failover there will be a choice of recovery points within the configured Continuous Data Protection (CDP) limit for a given VPG. Therefore your server/data restoration capability is limited to your available recovery points. If you have an offsite backup service you could leverage it for further restore options. You can migrate back to local infrastructure via the same failover mechanism. In this case the replication direction is from our service provider environment to your infrastructure Consumer Responsibilities Any data supplied by customer is accurate representation of the infrastructure the customer requires to protect. No significant new applications with specific data requirements (which would significantly change the I/O profile of the protected workloads) will be installed in the foreseeable future. Examples of applications that potentially are data hungry could be: o CCTV recording o Call centre phone logging o Document Management o Image scanning o Multimedia storage 2.18 Technical Requirements Ensure we are informed in advance of any maintenance or upgrades to your local infrastructure which may affect our service. In particular we request that you notify us of any vcenter maintenance or upgrades. Ensure the source infrastructure meets the minimum system requirements at all times. Gigabit network available in Customer Site for seeding. Connectivity to the DR environment with sufficient bandwidth, latency and reliability for the service to operate successfully. Firewall rules where applicable to allow the service components to operate. Provide a VMFS dedicated to journaling is recommended (in the event you need to replicate something from DR to your source site) Support details for Novosco to access your virtual environment remotely. Commercial in Confidence 14

16 2.19 Details of any trial service available. We can organise a 1 month limited trial please contact us for details Data Extraction/Removal Data Standards The replication virtual machines are stored in a mixture of VMware and proprietary formats. You can only get access to available recovery points via the provided failover mechanism in Live or Test modes Commitment to returning all consumer generated data We hold only a replica of the nominated virtual machines in the source environment Formats / standards into which data will be extracted The replication virtual machines are stored in a mixture of VMware and proprietary formats. You can only get access to available recovery points via the provided failover mechanism in Live or Test modes. When a VM is failed over, the data is available in the same format in which it was stored Price for extraction of consumer generated data Professional services will be required to extract and return consumer generated data. Such services will be quantified based on the volume and nature of the consumer generated data. Professional services will be based on SFIA rate card Confirmation that the Supplier will destroy Consumer generated data. Novosco will erase all consumer data at the end of the contract period. Commercial in Confidence 15

17 2.21 Data Storage and Processing Locations A choice of UK/ Ireland Tier 3 data centre Deployment Models CloudStream DRaaS Public and private models are available Service Models CloudStream DRaaS is delivered as an IaaS service model Burst v. Elastic Resources CloudStream DRaaS will allow an existing configuration to burst automatically by this we mean that existing protected VM will have certain configuration changes automatically mirrored on the DR site. Example of mirroring: Increasing the amount of configured RAM on a VM Increasing the size of a VMDK on a VM RAM is metered per 4GB of RAM. Disk is metered per 200GB. The service has a quota which is based on: Total GB of source data files when fully provisioned. We do not thin provision at the DR site; VMs when replicated will be expanded to their configured size if they are thin provisioned at the source. It is advised to order a quota which allows for some expansion during the contract term. Number of VMs protected. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) history of up to 24 hours. The source GB data quota is measured as the sum of files of the following when fully provisioned: Virtual machine hard disks (VMDKs, RDMs) Commercial in Confidence 16

18 Virtual machine swap files (vswap) 2.25 Guaranteed and Non-Guaranteed Resources We guarantee the paid for quota only. Any capacity used in excess of the paid for quota is not guaranteed Persistence of Storage With the provided definition the storage used by DRaaS can be described as non-persistent. DRaaS platform storage is only utilised while a VM is being protected. If a VM is removed from the service configuration the relevant data comprising the VM copy is deleted Service Provisioning Novosco has a standard process for the provisioning of the CloudStream DRaaS. We will supply the required material to allow a customer to order/provision/adjust services as required Utilisation Monitoring/Reporting We monitor utilisation monthly and report this utilisation to the customer Data Centre(s) Tier 3 self assessed Network Novosco understands the high expectations of service provider network environments. We provide a 100% network availability guarantee. We define this 100% network availability as the ability for network packets to traverse from our Internet edge routers to the backup service infrastructure switch ports via all intermediate equipment (routers, firewalls, switches and cabling). Commercial in Confidence 17

19 Our network infrastructure is monitored 24/7. For the purpose of clarity downtime is defined to begin whenever an issue is detected by our monitoring systems or you log a call directly relevant to such an issue. Please refer to our extended SLA document on exact response times and call logging procedures Use By Other Suppliers The service is available for use by other suppliers. Suppliers should liaise with their sales contact or Account Manager within Novosco to agree the amount of resource required to complete their project. Orders can be placed by sending the completed signed Order Form to Novosco at: G-Cloud@novosco.com 2.32 Standard Configurations Type Ram Storage Notes Base Per VM 4GB 200GB Each VM protected under the Base unit adds 4GB of RAM and 200GB to the service quota Service Roadmaps The service is comprised of a number of platform technologies that we have integrated together. New service features are dependent upon our evaluation of new capabilities and solution supportability. If we intend to remove or deprecate functionality we will notify the customer in a timely manner. At the time of writing we support vsphere 4.0 (on the customer infrastructure) but this is expected to be unsupported (from a service perspective) in the short term. The minimum version supported will then be vsphere 4.1. Commercial in Confidence 18

20 2.34 PaaS Types N/A for Lot 1 Infrastructure as a Service. Commercial in Confidence 19

21 3 Pricing Configuration Type Price per Month 4GB Ram with 200GB storage 100 Non-standard configurations are available, and will be priced on request. In addition to the consumption based pricing above for the CloudStream DRaaS, additional professional services may be purchased on an ad hoc basis. Such services may be required during the on-boarding and off-boarding process and will be quantified based on the client environment. High Level SFIA Job Family SFIA Job Family Relevant SFIA Levels Strategy and Architecture Solution Architecture 5-6 Solution Development and Implementation Systems Integration 2-6 Please contact us to discuss your requirements at For the associated day rates for these and other roles, please see the Novosco SFIA Rate Card. Please also see our Service Terms for the commercial information in support of this service. Commercial in Confidence 20

22 4 About Novosco Novosco is a leading provider of Cloud technologies, Managed Service and Consulting. We specialise in helping organisations utilise the unique aspects of emerging technologies to solve business challenges in new and dynamic ways. We operate under managed service or strategic partnership contracts with our major clients. Novosco has established partnerships with the very best hardware and software vendors in our areas of specialisation and we are committed to assisting our customers in the evaluation of all potential solutions, including the optimisation of current IT systems. Our main technical partners include: This approach combined with our proven engagement methodology enables us to develop and deliver cost-effective solutions that are an asset to your business. We offer a unique consulting talent and technical support expertise to companies wanting to realise the benefits of their IT investment. This is verified by our customers:- Novosco engineers are on site on a daily basis as a professional ICT resource. Belfast Trust IT professionals and Novosco staff work together as a team to deliver systems that enhance patient care - Paul Duffy, Co-Director for ICT & Telecommunications, BHSCT Novosco has a firm grasp of our business processes and drivers combined with in-depth knowledge of current and future technologies, with the ability to advise us on the best operational and strategic paths for our IT infrastructure. This, combined with an honest and open approach makes Novosco a core part of our team. Jim Cunningham, Assistant Director of Information System, Queens University Commercial in Confidence 21

23 History We have been successfully trading since We recently enjoyed our twelfth successive year in the Deloitte FAST50, an award which recognizes successful revenue growth for technology companies. We were also awarded Cisco Datacenter Partner of the Year and EMC Partner of the Year in Both awards were based on the volume and calibre of work delivered. For more information visit Commercial in Confidence 22