New Disaster Recovery Options Emerge

The best disaster recovery advice: Avoid disasters. Since that's not always possible, the next best advice is to choose the most cost-effective disaster recovery options -- ones that will work when needed.

Disaster recovery. Business continuity planning. Backups. These are subjects often considered boring by those not charged with making sure these technologies work. Nobody really pays much attention -- until a fire strikes, or servers and PCs are stolen, or a natural disaster occurs. At these times, businesses not only reach for their backups, they pray the files actually are there and their restore process works.

While hope and prayer have their place, they shouldn't be your strategy. A few years ago, downed systems or lost data might have slowed down businesses for a few days; today it probably means youre out of business. Perhaps that explains the projected rise in business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) spending among enterprises.

A recent study from research firm Frost & Sullivan , "North American Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Markets," estimates that business continuity and disaster recovery spending will reach $23.3 billion by 2012. That's up more than 50 percent from $15.1 billion in 2006. "We are seeing increased concern from small and mid-sized enterprises about how they protect their data," says Ted Warner, president of solution provider Connecting Point, based in Greeley, Colo.

Some of that concern certainly is the result of more businesses having learned through the troubling experiences of others, or even their own misfortune: conventional backup technologies -- tape, onsite storage -- aren't reliable. "It's surprising just how many companies don't bother to validate that their backup procedures are working properly," says Lester Keizer, CEO at Connecting Point Las Vegas."Imagine that your offices are burning down and you're standing there holding all of your backup tapes. What good are they to you?" asks Keizer. "It could take weeks to get back to work again."

In order to get a cost-effective and reliable BC/DR program in place, more businesses are taking advantage of falling storage costs and turning to new technologies, such as disk-to-disk storage, virtualization, off-site storage services, and BC/DR service providers.

Consider the option of disk-to-disk replication services over the Internet. Standard Internet throughput is about 600 kbit/s, which means the initial time to back up several terabytes would be unacceptable for most mid-sized enterprises -- but acceptable for many small businesses in search of a disaster recovery system. This also increases the likelihood that your files will be safe if some terrible event levels your physical infrastructure. Files also are available should a disk fail, or someone deletes the wrong folder.

The other viable option, for many SMBs and mid-tier enterprises, is outsourcing some, possibly all, of their BC/DR needs.

Consider XiloCore, a service that consists of a storage appliance that is located on a user’s site and regularly captures network "snapshots," including storage space, configuration data, and software, as well as user data. The data then is transmitted securely offsite to one of two data centers located in Las Vegas or Simi Valley.XiloCore service provides not only full disaster recovery, but also a safety net from the day-to-day woes associated with accidentally lost, deleted, or corrupted files. "The system always is scanning for corrupt files, for instance, and will replace the corrupted file instantaneously," says Keizer. In all, the service provides local backup for basic emergencies, automatic offsite backup, and secure remote access to programs, servers, and data. Should an unfortunate event occur, all customers need is a way to connect to the Internet in order to access and restore all of their backed-up data.

Similar types of services are proliferating. Staples recently kicked off a bevy of managed IT services for SMBs, including its Thrive Online Backup, which provides a way for companies to back up systems, applications, and data to a secure remote facility. The backup is performed automatically to protect against all types of data loss.

Larger enterprises can choose to outsource or to manage their own BC/DR needs more cost-effectively than was before possible. Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Security LLC , attributes the growth to new technologies and services, made more affordable by virtualization and enhancements to the Internet in the past decade. Barely five years ago, having good DR/BC meant owning duplicate hardware systems -- vast amounts of backup systems on site and off -- at a cost that proved burdensome to many large businesses.

Those companies that can afford the staffs with the skills to leverage virtualization technologies not only can improve their BC/DR programs, but also save money while doing so. While physical-centric DR programs require identical systems to be replicated at a second data center, that's not the case with virtualization. Virtualization abstracts hardware (such as device drivers), so a baseline set of virtual machines can be created and deployed rapidly. That's because virtual machines store everything associated with the system, from operating system to IP address. Thus, businesses quickly can recover their exact system images on the fly -- without the worry, or cost, of maintaining specific hardware on site and also reducing configuration errors and the amount of time to recover lost systems.

However, virtual machines can create new challenges. When a single physical server holds 20 virtual servers, it can substantially increase the amount of data that needs to be backed up, the amount of bandwidth needed to transport that data, and the time involved in doing a complete backup. Still, the benefits of server virtualization can outweigh those issues, and vendors are coming up with approaches that minimize the bandwidth and time concerns.While there always seems to be great attention placed on the need for business continuity and disaster recovery services immediately following a natural disaster, companies now are looking for more cost-effective ways to meet that need -- and systems integrators and service providers with affordable and reliable BC/DR services in place always are ready to meet that need. "That's what makes this class of service offerings one of the most successful right now," says Connecting Point's Warner.