TECHNOLOGY BC/DR
Recovery – applications should be made resilient to failure, negating the need to recover from failure due to one-off disasters and avoiding application downtime. To achieve application resiliency, companies need to take a pre-emptive approach to business disruption, rather than assuming a more traditional, reactive attitude. It’s worth examining whether virtualization on it’s own addresses the real business continuity need. A plan devised on a granular level, building out an extra layer of resilience for the architecture on an application-by- application basis, will normally be the best route to ensure staff are equipped to make correct decisions around IT continuity. This approach means the correct decisions can be made when dealing with minor glitches and during more demanding situations should they occur.
To achieve an application resilient solution in a virtual space, you must combine application monitoring, secondary server clones, continuous data replication and automated failover, rather than just using one of these approaches in isolation. By doing so, when an application fails it can be seamlessly switched over to a secondary virtual site and users can maintain connectivity without interruption. This applies whether the primary application is physical or virtual. Neverfail technology is able to deliver this combination of processes across virtual, physical and heterogeneous environments.
One of Neverfail’s end-users – Fast Track – is a prime example of how these four resiliency components are being used in practice. Fast Track is an international sports marketing agency which manages the execution of high-profile events including the Aviva UK Athletics Grand Prix Events and provided
consultancy on the 2009 British & Irish Lions Tour in South Africa. One of the company’s major concerns and objectives is keeping IT systems available 24/7. This is particularly important when events are underway as there is increased demand for remote access to business-critical applications. Prior to using Neverfail’s technology, Fast Track previously sent staff home when systems had incurred downtime, and remote workers were left without access to email or critical documents.
Fast Track’s ability to make decisions on behalf of clients was invariably impaired when these situations arose, impacting both business revenue and customer satisfaction. Since Neverfail’s continuous availability software has been in place to support mission-critical applications, such as Blackberry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Exchange, Fast Track has benefitted from round-the-clock connectivity and application uptime. The primary data centre is housed at its London headquarters, while the DR site, based on a virtualised infrastructure from VMware, is housed some 30 miles away in Maidenhead. Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite is used to monitor the performance and availability of the entire application space across both datacentre environments, including physical and virtual infrastructures.
IT team at Fast Track looked at how virtualisation can bring benefit across the board. Leveraged by Neverfail’s ability to offer BC both during the implementation process and once the virtual infrastructure was in place. With the assistance of Neverfail’s software, Fast Track has been able to test critical and non-critical applications at its secondary virtualised site before finalising decisions around which applications should be hosted on physical servers, and which could be adequately supported on VMs. The ability to failover and failback at the click-of-a-button was critical to this decision making process, which will lead to standardisation across both sites, providing a more resilient infrastructure for day-to-day business processes moving forwards. This investment paid off when Fast Track was faced with a significant power outage during a major athletics event they were organising which included periods of live TV broadcast. To ensure continuity they switched IT operations to the secondary, Disaster Resiliency, site ensuring un-interrupted IT services during the event.
Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of “disaster recovery” for businesses. Today this capability is more important than ever, particularly as organisations need to be able to recover from a disaster – and quickly – in order to remain competitive, and meet growing customer expectations. However, with an ever- increasing reliance on IT and the emergence of virtualisation, customers should seriously consider disaster and application resiliency in virtualised environments during any planning and implementation stage. A key consideration in any BC/ DR rollout should go beyond site recovery and address business resiliency , guaranteeing employees are able to continue working through interruptions, ensuring that business profitability and customer satisfaction continues to grow.
WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK MARCH | 2011 35
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