MANAGED SERVICES cloud
Ease of testing However, Webster does agree that for larger organisations the benefits of RaaS are magnified. One example of this increase for larger organisations is in Disaster Recovery testing. Gartner estimates that the costs of traditional recovery testing and exercising often constitute a significant portion of the annual disaster-recovery budget which in some cases can exceed $100,000 or more per exercise. In many cases, RaaS can reduce or even eliminate these costs as the recovery is highly automated and can be tested in a non-production environment.
Even testing a DR position in a complex environment can be nigh on impossible as many web applications and services often have complex meshed relationships and dependencies on other applications and data. According to the analysts, RaaS can help reduce the complexity through the replication and recovery of application-specific and interdependent groups of Vms.
Technical backgrounder
Although there are a growing number of vendors in the market, according to Webster, the technology works in a similar fashion across all the flavours. For example, Doyenz own rCloud which offers a service that allows organisations to take backup images of their entire local production servers into a recovery cloud (rCloud).
Then every night the changes on these local production servers are synchronised with the image in the rCloud through an Internet connection. Larger organisations can use a dedicated leased line for performance. These changes might only be a few megabytes as it is rare for the application software to change – it is normally just new or changed data such as transactions, invoices or stock changes.
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In the event of a local server failure or more serious site disruption such as a burst water pipe, fire or loss of power, Doyenz can initiate a failover, providing the customer access to its previously dormant image that has been kept safe in rCloud. This is a virtualised version that is started in its datacentre and now able to deliver access to the full application complete with the last set of data. The organisations can now access this application using an internet connected browser from any location.
Depending on the type of application, there might be a slight performance hit due to latency but a temporary 15% reduction in performance is acceptable compared to the complete loss of a critical system. “Some larger organisations can also fire-up dormant broadband or increase bandwidth from communication service providers at short notice to mitigate any latency issues,” Webster adds.
The end customer can now carry on working as normal as the rCloud version of the critical production server has all the same capabilities and integration with on premise; the only difference is that it is hosted remotely across the internet instead of on the local network. This could be just one server or an entire site depending on how many servers are protected by the rCloud.
When the customer has resolved the local server or site issue, a complete server image is taken from the rCloud and shipped back to the customer on removable media such as removable hard disk to help IT staff rebuild the on-site server. And just before the new on-premise server goes live, all the changes that have taken place while the customer has been using the rCloud based server can be synchronised across any broadband or leased line link.
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