Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution Produced by SearchStorage.com Presenters: Jon Bock and Ian Selway Sponsored by Copyright 2008 HP. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as allowed under the copyright laws. Design Copyright 2008 TechTarget. All Rights Reserved. HP_08_2008_0021
Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution This document is based on an HP/TechTarget webcast entitled Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution. Max McDonough: Hello, and welcome to our podcast. Today, we will be looking at business continuity and availability and focusing on disaster recovery. Why is it important? What can you do if disaster strikes, as well as how can you plan to make it easier to recover your systems and information if a disaster happens? My name is Max McDonough of TechTarget and joining me today is Jon Bock, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware. Also joining me today is Ian Selway, HP Worldwide Solutions Manager for HP StorageWorks. Jon, if we look back over the last few years, disaster seems to have struck regularly at the most unexpected times and from unexpected quarters. Given this, why are we even still talking about disaster recovery? Surely every business has a DR plan. Jon Bock: Max, you are absolutely correct. Businesses do recognize the importance of having a disaster recovery plan. I am sure that every IT manager out there has some story about a natural disaster causing a data center outage, or maybe it was something such as a power outage or even simply human error that actually brought an entire data center down. Even though businesses recognize that these things do happen, they all have a lot of challenges in finding solutions that really meet their needs for disaster recovery. In the past businesses have had to look at making trade-offs between how much they are protecting and how well they are protecting it. Organizations were only able to really protect the small number of their applications that were the most critical applications, but were unable to really provide the type of protection that they needed for the rest of their infrastructure. So, even though most organizations had a backup plan in place for their entire infrastructure, they actually are now being asked to provide disaster recovery that goes beyond just backup, that can provide fast recovery for a broader part of their infrastructure. Max McDonough: That sounds like a precarious backup strategy. Jon Bock: Max, you are absolutely correct. A recent study from the Enterprise Strategy Group suggests that 51% of organizations feel that their current backup plans leave them at risk of losing data in the event of an outage. As a result, we are finding that a lot of organizations, when they do have a disaster, are not even able to survive. A number of different research studies have shown that an organization that can t meet those recovery requirements for restoring its data and recovering its systems may actually go out of business. As a result, IT managers really are focusing a lot on disaster recovery, and they really want to be confident that the disaster recovery plans they have are going to meet those needs. They want to be confident that they will be able to actually recover their operations, their data as well their systems at a remote site in the event of a disaster. If they can do that, and they can test it to make sure that it actually works, that s when they know that they have an effective disaster recovery plan in place. But I bet if we ask the IT managers who are listening, many of them would admit that in their organization they haven t reached that point yet. Max McDonough: Many of our listeners today have probably deployed VMware, but where do they start putting in place a disaster recovery solution that is up to the task? What should they be considering? Jon Bock: Work to understand what it is that you need to protect. What is the critical information that you need to protect, and what are the systems and applications you require to be able to make use of that information? Once you have made that classification, then you can start looking at the different recovery objectives for the different parts of your environment. By making that analysis you are going to be able to start looking at the processes and technology that you will need to put in place to actually have a disaster recovery plan for those systems. There are a number of different technologies from both VMware and HP that customers are using together today to deliver a disaster recovery plan for those important applications. Products such as 1
VMware Infrastructure and the new VMware Site Recovery Manager product combined with HP s EVA and continuous array application software allow businesses to create, test, and execute a disaster recovery strategy that s cost effective, easy to implement, and robust enough to withstand an actual disaster. Max McDonough: Jon, I can see that it makes logical sense, but can you tell me some more about VMware SRM? Jon Bock: I certainly can. Site Recovery Manager is a new product from VMware that s designed to overcome the key challenges of disaster recovery. With Site Recovery Manager and VMware infrastructure, we can eliminate the dependencies between operating systems and hardware that was one of the complexities that often lead to failed recoveries in the past. Site Recovery Manager also helps organizations with all the different processes that go into disaster recovery. So, the processes for creating a recovery plan and figuring that, updating it, testing it and executing it, all of those processes can be centrally managed from within a virtual center. Instead of having very complex manual run books that can often run several hundred pages to document all the different steps in the disaster recovery plan, with Site Recovery Manager, all of that information is now a part of the virtual environment that can be managed through Virtual Center. When I need to actually execute my disaster recovery plan, all of the different steps and processes can be automated using Site Recovery Manager. As a result, I am no longer dependent on human error, I am no longer dependent on those run books being up to date, tested and correct, and I have a way to make sure that I can repeat this disaster recovery process correctly at any time. Max McDonough: So, Jon having outlined what VMware SRM can do, Ian, perhaps you can explain why our listeners might want to use an EVA 4400 and Continuous Access in combination with Site Recovery Manager. Ian Selway: Thank you, Max. Hopefully, you have seen from Jon s explanation how VMware Site Recovery Manager can radically reduce the complexity of deploying disaster recovery scenarios. EVA 4400 and HP s Continuous Access really build on this simplicity. In fact, the EVA 4400 was really designed from the beginning to deliver virtual storage for midsize and larger organizations, while at the same time providing enhanced performance, better capacity utilization and easier management, and all of this at an affordable price. So, whether EVA really helps in terms of the replication both from a snapshot perspective with HP Business Copy and with HP Continuous Access with remote replication between arrays on different sites, the Continuous Access solution really helps you to build a very disaster tolerant solution to keep your applications online during backups and restores. At the same time EVA 4400 is really designed so that you spend less time managing your storage and more time managing your business. Max McDonough: The combination of VMware and HP StorageWorks delivers a really compelling proposition to our listeners. Jon, where should they begin? Jon Bock: The first place to start is to develop a good disaster recovery plan. But at the same time, it s not just about writing the plan, it s also about being able to test it and update it when you need to make changes to it, so you can make sure that it s always up to date and it s always going to be correct for the environment as the environment changes. In a traditional environment, that s been a really complicated part of it. How do I test it? How do I keep it up to date? And as a result, it s really hard to know that you actually have a recovery plan that s going to work. But if you look at the combination of VMware Site Recovery Manager and HP EVA 4400, the fact that they make it so much simpler and easier to set up, update and test your disaster recovery plan means that you can actually do testing much more frequently and know that your testing is actually going to help you to make sure that that disaster recovery plan works as designed. As a result, now as my environment changes, I have a plan that s easy to keep up to date. I no longer have to go and put post-it notes into that run book, I no longer have to cross my fingers and hope it s going to work. I know it s going to work, because I have actually spent the time to set up an environment that s easy to keep up to date as the environment changes. Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution 2
Max McDonough: So, Ian, now that we have spoken about the planning, perhaps you can tell our listeners how they might deploy this type of DR solution. Ian Selway: Thanks, Max. When deploying disaster recovery, one of the things that goes hand in hand with some of the other advantages that VMware brings in terms of consolidation is using some of the savings that you ve seen from consolidating your infrastructure with VMware to instigate a very cost effective disaster recovery scenario. So, for example, if you consolidate your servers with VMware, one of the positive side effects is that you can take those servers and perhaps redeploy them as a part of your DR scenario at a remote site. You can also use the savings that you re going to see in reduced power and cooling to fund your disaster recovery project. And as you d expect from HP and VMware, the combination of the two offerings from the companies enables us to protect businesses of every size and to enable those businesses to recover in the event of disaster striking. VMware is a leader in server virtualization, as is its virtual infrastructure software. That virtual infrastructure software has enabled organizations to overcome planned and unplanned server downtimes for many years, but now with the introduction of Site Recovery Manager, VMware and HP are taking disaster recovery to a new level of failover of virtual machines between sites. HP compliments its capability obviously with a very strong hardware, software and services portfolio around disaster recovery planning. The HP StorageWorks portfolio is one of the broadest in the industry, spanning everything from low-cost high-speed tape right through to physical and virtual tape libraries and storage arrays, with both snapshot and replication technologies built in. What this means to listeners is that they can rely on HP and VMware to propose and implement disaster recovery solutions that really meet their business requirements. Max McDonough: Without mentioning any products, tell me a little bit more about why I should consider HP and VMware. Ian Selway: Let me summarize for you the three reasons why I believe you have to select HP and VMware as your disaster recovery vendors. First off, from an HP perspective, it s our proven experience. We ve got over a 30-year track record of providing proven scalable solutions that really help customers deliver DR solutions that can help save their businesses. And couple this with the fact that we have been working with VMware for over seven years on virtualization. We really understand virtualization and how that virtualization can be combined with HP s infrastructure to help design, deploy and manage that whole virtual environment, the business applications that you run on top of it, and of course the need to protect and recover that information should disaster happen. Secondly, it s about our global expertise. HP has one of the broadest channel offerings of any vendor available today. HP has trained and certified more VMware professionals than any other organization. So what this means is that we have very qualified partners and services professionals who can really help you assess your business needs and make recommendations as to what are the appropriate solutions to address your business requirements. If you look at HP on our own, we have a global team of qualified players and high availability experts, as well as over 50 recovery centers and DR units operating across the globe. Finally, from a product leadership and innovation perspective, HP is a continued market leader in the storage business. Not only do we deliver disaster recovery solutions with our StorageWorks, we span that over our server and software offerings as well. Our relationship not only with VMware, but with other application vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, means we understand what those application requirements are that need to be protected. We know what needs to be backed up, but more importantly, we know what is required to recover those applications, effectively and efficiently. Max McDonough: So why don t we wrap things up here? Perhaps you could both tell our listeners where they can find out more information about both VMware s SRM product and Virtualization sessions featuring HP s StorageWorks. Jon? Jon Bock: Certainly. There s a lot of great information on the VMware website that you can use to understand more about VMware solutions and also about the VMware and HP partnership. One place to start is www.vmware.com/products/srm, where you ll find a lot of information about Site Recovery Manager specifically. A number of webcasts are coming up that will help you learn more about what Site Recovery Manager is and does. So, we definitely encourage you to take a look at those. Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution 3
Ian Selway: Max, HP is also running a number of Virtualization sessions. If customers would like to register for more information about what HP StorageWorks is doing in virtualization, I would urge them to visit www.hp.com/go/virtualizenow, where they will be able to register for upcoming virtualization webinars with HP. If they want to find out more information about what HP can do with VMware, then I would urge them to go and visit www.hp.com/go/vmware. There they will be able to find a wealth of information about what HP is doing with VMware around disaster recovery. Max McDonough: I d like to thank Jon Bock of VMware and Ian Selway of HP for participating in today s discussion. I m Max McDonough. Planning and Deploying a Disaster Recovery Solution 4