PROTECTING SHAREPOINT WITH DOUBLE-TAKE AVAILABILITY

PROTECTING SHAREPOINT WITH DOUBLE-TAKE AVAILABILITY Whitepaper Double-Take Software, Inc. Published: October, 2009 Online Collaboration: Preserving Order amid Chaos If you've been in the workforce awhile, you can probably remember the way collaboration used to work. Do you remember: * faxing a document back and forth to a colleague with handwritten changes in the margins? * feeling the creeping dread of how behind you were getting by the minute when not in the office? * not knowing who had what version of which document? * trying to coordinate schedules to get everyone in one room? * publishing or making decisions based on an incorrect version of a document? Collaboration and compliance issues as the workforce distributed in the 1990s was a serious growing pain on the technology timeline. When web-based collaboration tools came on the scene in the late 90s, online document collaboration became possible. When SharePoint made its debut in 2001, it made online collaboration streamlined, consistent and - amid much fanfare from regulated industry - nearly foolproof. As the global workforce continued to distribute (and as regulated industry continued to tighten up compliance scenarios) collaboration tools and document libraries became an essential part of daily business. Enter SharePoint In 2001 SharePoint Team Services offered an option for an easily customizable intranet - and it was a big hit, selling 17 million user licenses within 18 months of release 1. Improvements came quickly and now SharePoint Services is all grown up, providing document libraries, a platform for developing applications, portals, team work spaces, e-mail, and web-based conferencing. Today SharePoint provides the ability to share and collaborate effectively regardless of where your workforce is stationed. It also offers incremental deployment options, allowing IT to implement organizationspecific solutions on time and within budget. SharePoint integrates with tools you already use, making it easy to get started quickly and not least, it provides security and trackable history - which not only preserves sanity but keeps regulated companies out of hot water. How SharePoint Works SharePoint uses a web front-end, an application server and a number of SQL Server databases as the storage backend for shared data and configuration information. It's possible to get by with just the features in SharePoint Services, but adding SharePoint Server provides a far more robust set of capabilities. A SharePoint implementation can consist of a single server, but more likely, it consists of several servers that make up a server farm - or multiple server farms. SharePoint pages are built from Web Parts and ASP.NET-based components which are combined to make a web page. SharePoint sites can be used to share information, administer surveys and collaborate on documents- which can be checked in, checked out and version controlled. Communication in SharePoint is facilitated via email or instant messenger. Content is searchable and users can receive alerts regarding new or changed documents. Site content and layout can be personalized on an individual basis, even for non-programmers. 1 www.mssmartsolutions.com www.doubletake.com 888-674-9495

2 SharePoint Services Windows SharePoint Services offers collaboration and document management capabilities through web portals that provide a central repository for browser-based document sharing and management. SharePoint Services also includes web-based workspaces, dashboards, navigation, e-mail alerts, shared calendars, contacts and discussion forums. Active Directory or HTML?Forms authentication provides the ability to administer permissions. Office SharePoint Server Office SharePoint Server manages unstructured content such as Office documents, web pages, PDF files and email messages, enabling users to find and share information no matter where they are. Additionally, it reduces the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all intranet, extranet and web applications on one integrated platform. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server provides enterprise functionality beyond Windows SharePoint Services. It includes features like workflow, content management, forms-driven business processes, enhanced search and enterprise application integration. These enterprise features allow deeper integration with your business data and make SharePoint Server an even more critical piece of your infrastructure than Windows SharePoint Services. SharePoint Server also allows additional separation of presentation, application and data tiers which allows greater scalability of the system. However, separating functionality into specialized servers also increases the total number of failure points. Therefore, high availability and disaster recovery planning become more critical to allow users to remain productive. From Moscow to Memphis - the Collaboration Age It's a fact that robust tools like SharePoint enabled the explosion of digital data and virtualized workers. Consider that nearly 80% of corporate information is now digitized 2 and combine that with the fact that 1.6 million people in the UK telecommute 3 and nearly one quarter of American workers telecommute at least once a month 4, 75% of managers in AsiaPac believe telecommuting improves creativity and productivity 5 and you've got yourself a virtual workforce dealing almost exclusively with virtual information. If you hadn't noticed - not many of us get together around the conference table with stacks of file folders anymore. Seventy-six percent of all workers surveyed said they preferred to work at home, and felt more productive working off site. The EPA estimated that $23 billion could be saved in transportation, environmental and energy costs if there were only a 10% increase in telecommuting 6. Canadian workers said they would save six weeks a year by eliminating their commute 7. Maybe you're thinking what many data protection groups are thinking: Now that all of our critical data is digitized and more than a quarter of the workforce are collaborating across the country or across the globe...what happens if we lose critical data, or even access to data, in an outage or disaster? The answer is woefully obvious - project teams come to a screeching halt. 2 www.onlinesecurity.com 3 www.ncc.co.uk 4 www.infoworld.com 5 www.avaya-apac.com 6 www.epa.com 7 www.quintcareers.com

3 The Cost of Downtime RPO and RTO It's a very real and costly problem. When project teams aren't working, when data or access to data and critical applications like SharePoint is lost, - businesses lose money at an alarming rate. Trying to stay profitable when you can't quickly access or restore data is like trying to eat soup with a fork - it's just not possible. In fact, it's not uncommon for post-failure analysis to show direct costs of tens of thousands of dollars per hour for major outages. Those costs increase for businesses that are highly dependent on their data systems. If you haven't thought about what downtime would cost your company, it can be precisely calculated using the formula below. Keep in mind that when considering any business continuity technology, establishing some baseline expectations is important. It's important to examine possible solutions in terms of two goals: data protection and data availability. These goals can be measured using two quantitative measures: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) represents the amount of time between the start of an outage and the resumption of normal business operations. The RTO for an outage that can be resolved by reloading from a tape backup includes the time necessary to locate and mount the tape, the time required to restore the data from the tape, and any time necessary to post-process the restored data before restarting the downed applications. Replicated storage systems offer an RTO close to zero. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) represents the point to which business data can be restored. This can be thought of as the latency between a production data set and its redundant or replicated copy. This latency may be expressed as a number of changes or a time interval; it measures how out-of-date the replicated copy will be compared to the original. For example, a nightly backup means that the RPO will be the time between when data was written to the tape and when the failure occurs: a failure any time on Tuesday has an RPO of Monday night. With replicated storage, the RPO is near-zero. Calculating Downtime Costs per Hour Data availability requirements are usually expressed in terms of RTO, because the key factor that drives availability needs is the requirement to have access to critical data within a certain interval. By contrast, data protection requirements are usually expressed in terms of RPO. These requirements revolve around the need not to lose any important data. To appreciate the gravity of a downtime scenario, estimate the downtime costs for employees, suppliers and customers if they can't access critical information. The following method provides a simple way to estimate the average cost per occurrence of downtime. It can be used to estimate the total cost of downtime over the course of a quarter or year for planning purposes. Cost Per Occurrence = (To + Td) x (Hr + Lr) To = Time / Length of Outage Td = Time Delta to Data Backup (How long since the last backup?) Hr = Hourly Rate of Personnel (Calculate by monthly expenditure per department divided by the number of work hours.) Lr = Lost Revenue per Hour (Applies if the department generates profit. A good rule is to look at profitability over three months and dividing by the number of work hours.) Next, define the recovery objectives for applications - the RTO and RPO for each application. So What's an Administrator to Do? Data protection efforts often focus more on preserving access to the data under dire circumstances than on the amount of time required to regain access to the data if those circumstances occur. Most businesses face a conundrum: tape backup systems are inexpensive and fairly reliable, but they offer poor RPO and RTO. Mirrored disk systems (like those found in storage hardware from various vendors) offer excellent RPO and RTO, but they are expensive to buy and manage. An ideal solution would offer acceptable RTO and RPO without excessive acquisition or management cost. Continuous data replication, in many cases, meets these objectives.

4 Protecting SharePoint with Double-Take Availability Providing SharePoint recoverability is a two-step process that requires first protecting data and then recovering the application to allow users to continue working as quickly as possible. Most of SharePoint's data is stored in either the SQL Server back-end database or as files on disk; however there are also metadata integration points within the registry that should be protected to provide complete recoverability. This adds an application recovery challenge that most solutions on the market cannot overcome, especially when using third-party Web Parts and custom developed software and integration. Therefore most vendor support for SharePoint failover will only provide the most basic recovery and will require constant administrator supervision to maintain proper recovery capability, making most vendor protection solutions for SharePoint incomplete at worst and unreliable for at best. How it Works Double-Take Availability is built on a mature code base that spans well over a decade with tens of thousands of customer implementations. The replication engine forms the foundation of the solution and is the single most award-winning data replication product ever created. Double-Take Availability also purposely avoids the management problems associated with open architecture customized applications like SharePoint by allowing full server failover. This protects the entire server in real time without ever stopping the production application or sacrificing transactional integrity. With Double-Take Availability you won't have to constantly manage the failover machines, apply service packs or custom and third-part application updates in order to keep the target server in-sync with the production server. This provides a complete set-and-forget protection architecture that allows you to focus your time on production issues and not on your recoverability infrastructure. Double-Take Availability also provides data recovery point-in-time granularity of seconds, minutes, hours and days into the past, allowing you to recover your SharePoint server in case of a corruption caused by user or administrator error, a bad service pack update or a malicious attack. You can also have the opportunity to choose more than one point in time, so you don't have to worry about blindly choosing the wrong one. Double-Take Availability allows you to recover and test the system; if the problem still exists you can simply choose an earlier recovery point and repeat until you find a good logical recovery point. Protecting SharePoint in a Single-Server Architecture Protecting SharePoint running in a single server configuration with Double-Take Availability is as simple as four clicks of the mouse using the Application Manager. Simply select the source production server, and then select the target failover server that will protect the source. Next, tell the Application Manager to validate the configuration - it will inspect your servers and network infrastructure using the most common configuration problems. Finally tell Double-Take Availability to enable protection and the servers are configured to begin replication and monitoring for failure. Behind the scenes, Double-Take Availability uses its patented data integrity algorithms to guarantee logical transactional order of operations, guaranteeing the possibility of having a suspect database or torn pages that would make recovery impossible. Double-Take Availability replicates and replays the entire transaction on the target server in real time, dramatically reducing your target server's Recovery Point Objective to within milliseconds of the production source server. Using Double-Take Availability for your SharePoint protection needs provides you with the most complete recoverability solution possible. It actively protects the SQL Server database and file data as well as the application binaries and the entire operating system including the registry. This protects your SharePoint data, configuration and automatically protects any third-party Web Parts or custom development and integration with other enterprise applications. Best of all, Double-Take Availability continuously updates the target with any updates on the production source server so you never have to worry about application versioning and compatibility.

5 If Double-Take Availability detects a source failure it will notify you through standard methods such as SNMP, Microsoft Operations Manager, WMI, EventLog or email. You also have the option of performing automatic failover or choosing manual fail-over which allows you to further check the root cause of the failure notification and then failover when you're ready. At that point Double-Take Availability begins recovering SharePoint by dynamically re-imaging the target operating system and bringing it and the SQL Server and SharePoint services online. The entire SharePoint failover process happens within a matter of a few minutes, at which point your users are able to access the entire system identically as if it were the production server. Protecting SharePoint in a Multi-Server Architecture Protecting a multi-tiered SharePoint implementation is more challenging than a single server. The application modules are spread across different purpose-built servers to avoid conflicting performance requirements and to optimize the total SharePoint experience. Double-Take Availability was designed to support SharePoint multi-tiered failover using full system failover and application failover to protect the entire distributed application. Preservation of the SharePoint web server or just the database tier is not sufficient because of the tight integration between the two tiers. SQL Server stores much of the SharePoint data, but key pieces of the application are stored in flat files and the configuration metadata is stored in the registry. Customization is also a key selling point of the SharePoint platform so it's very common for developers to create custom Web Parts and use third-party Web Parts. Therefore, any strategy that seeks to protect SharePoint has to take into consideration all of these additional protection points or it isn't a complete recoverability solution. Double-Take Availability provides you with the flexibility to protect the entire SharePoint systems by using methods specialized to cater for each purpose-built server. Protecting the Web front-end server uses the unique full server failover technology to provide real-time protection of the files on disk, Web Parts as well as the IIS and SharePoint configurations stored in the registry.

6 Protecting the SQL Server backend machine can use Double-Take Availability's application failover functionality to provide the fastest recoverability possible. Double-Take Availability uses patented transactional aware database monitoring features to replicate SQL Server databases without sacrificing performance or data integrity like many general replication solutions. Application failover with Double-Take Availability works similarly to clustering, but with much more flexibility. Double-Take Availability will update network resources as necessary depending on your network environment and then start the application services. A this point SQL Server will performing its normal recovery processing by rolling forward any transactions that had not yet committed to the database files. This process guarantees crash consistency of the database running on the production server if it had a sudden crash, and Double-Take Availability doesn't prohibit this recovery like many tools since it is transactional aware. Thus, SQL Server fail-over happens in two minutes or less- as quickly as Microsoft Clustered failover. Protecting SharePoint in LAN environments is a great benefit, but to truly protect your data assets it's important to send that application data off site. Many solutions try to provide this functionality, but most fail short in either providing the necessary protection across Wide Area Networks or their Total Cost of Ownership is too high because they require extraordinary bandwidth requirements. Double-Take Availability was designed well over a decade ago to use the absolute minimum amount of bandwidth required and still support real-time replication. You can shape your bandwidth using Double-Take Availability 's native traffic management features or use it in combination with third-party bandwidth management features like TCP/IP Quality of Service (QoS) and WAN Acceleration products. Double-Take Availability failover works across networks without to regard for separate network subnets, so your applications will be available off site, across the country or on the other side of the planet in just a few minutes Summary Double-Take Availability provides the only complete protection solutions for your SharePoint implementations. It protects the data, customizations and Web Parts, SharePoint configuration and the server state. Double-Take Availability recovers your applications quickly and allows your users to continue working. Double-Take Availability also allows you to minimize your Total Cost of Ownership for disaster recovery implementation by reducing the amount of data required for transmission. Bandwidth is the single largest expense in off-site replication architectures and Double-Take Availability uses the absolute least amount of this precious resource possible. Manage your subscription to enews. Visit: www.doubletake.com/subscribe Printed on recycled paper. Get the standard today: www.doubletake.com or 888-674-9495 Double-Take Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Double-Take, Balance Double-Take Cargo, Double-Take Flex, Double-Take for Hyper-V, Double-Take for Linux, Double-Take Move, Double-Take ShadowCaster, Double-Take for Virtual Systems, GeoCluster, Livewire, netboot/i, NSI, sanfly,timedata,timespring, winboot/i and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of Double-Take Software, Inc. and/or its affiliates and subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft, Hyper-V,Windows, and the Windows logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, SUSE are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.all other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.