Disaster Recovery Express

This is not specifically a Notes/Domino post - but in a small business you have to wear lots of hats... and one of mine is the disaster recovery plan. Since Domino is one of the essential enterprise services I have to be able to recover I think it's relevant.

I've received several marketing emails from IBM over the past few days about this item. Yes the Express brand extends to more than just software. Here we have a 7U chassis that runs on regular power, includes bays for up to 9 terabytes of disk storage, that can hold hot-swap modules for Gigabit Ethernet, supports Intel and AMD Opteron blades and comes with easy management tools to control the environment - they even offer an office enablement kit that adds an acoustical module to dampen sound - with a locking front door and 4U of additional space. When coupled with VMWare VI3 software, a DataDomain virtual tape library appliance (3U) and a router (1U) you have a configuration with the potential to be the perfect disaster recovery platform for a small business.

Small businesses need disaster recovery plans as much as large businesses - in fact probably more since small businesses tend to be less geographically diverse - ask any small business along the Mississippi Gulf Coast or in New Orleans. Protecting your corporate data can mean the difference between the business continuing of failing after a disaster strikes. For those of us whose companies are publicly traded it's not really even an option to not have a disaster recovery plan.... generally though smaller businesses have to outsource their disaster recovery site to a business recovery service like IBM BRS or Sungard.

Several years ago we reviewed what we were paying for outsourced disaster recovery and what the cost would be if we ever moved beyond the annual two day disaster recovery test and actually had to use the service and we decided that we could do it cheaper in-house. Luckily we have a subsidiary geographically distant enough to make it possible and some surplus older (or refurbished) equipment that could be configured to handle our core business processes. Product offerings like the one above make this process much more possible for a small business.

With the BladeCenter you will need at least two blades running VMWare with a third running VMWares Virtual Center management software,your corporate backup software and all the normal network management tools normally needed. Using P2V conversion tools that come with VMWare VI3 you can create a virtual server version of each of your core business servers (Windows, Linux and most Intel versions of Unix are supported as VMs). With the VMs converted you have a base version of your system.

The weakest link in any tape backup system is the tape. How many times have you attempted to restore from tape only to find that the tape was defective or the backup operation had failed? Tapes also require storage, movement from primary site to DR site and must be loaded and watched during restore operations. Fortunately there are now solutions to get rid of tape - and I'm not suggesting writing to DVDs. We discovered and implemented a DataDomain virtual tape library this year to help us ease the burden of backing up SAP.

DataDomain devices can appear to your backup software as a regular tape library but they include an intelligent storage server with raid protected disk storage and employ a data deduplication technique that allows for enormous compression of data. We are currently experienceing a 10.5 to 1 compression ratio - your mileage may vary depending on the type of data you store. DataDomain devices also support replication and they replicate the deduplicated data. This allows you to install a pair of their libraries at your primary and disaster recovery site and with sufficient bandwidth - replicate your data over either a private data link or a VPN connection.

If you don't have a disaster recovery plan - you need one. No matter how small a business - even if you aren't in an area effected by hurricanes, tornados, wild fires or floods - what happens when you have a fire? when the toilet in the restroom upstairs overflows?

If you have your disaster recovery site out-sourced - consider your options? Is there a business partner, supplier or associated company in the area who you could work out a deal with? What are the options in your area for co-location space? Business Partners - do you have small customers who might be able to use this as a service? The idea could be scalable - with the infrastructure supporting multiple smaller sites.

If you have any questions about using VMWare or DataDomain or about disaster recovery in general let me know. If I don't have the answers I do have resources.