MASTERS of DISASTER Disaster Recovery-As-A-Service Capability Positions IT Departments to Bounce Back from Events Ranging from Mundane to Catastrophic

COVER STORY | DISASTER RECOVERY MASTERS OF DISASTER Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service capability positions IT departments to bounce back from events ranging from mundane to catastrophic.

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iven the potential consequences reported having no DR plan in place. the recovery department because of downtime and data loss, Misconceptions about what contingency plans are difficult to G many organizations’ disaster constitutes a disaster are part of the implement and even more difficult recovery (DR) preparedness today problem. “People think a building has to execute. But the costs of failing is decidedly lacking. Based on its to be under water or a smoking hole to prepare can be daunting. 2014 DR survey of midsized and large to invoke their DR plan,” says Andrew In the Disaster Recovery organizations, TheInfoPro, a service Klos, a cloud aggregation specialist at Preparedness (DRP) Council’s 2014 of 451 Research, released findings CDW. “The reality is that human error survey, 64 percent of the organizations that would rattle the most seasoned is the leading cause of disasters.” asked reported financial damages from risk manager: one in five respondents, IT organizations come up short in IT outages, with 20 percent seeing

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direct dollar losses ranging from 10, legacy DR giants and vendors In a hybrid DR cloud, customers $50,000 to more than $5 million due from other IT segments have moved run an appliance on-premises that to critical application downtime. into the space through new product automates local backup for fast “You have to plan for everything, offerings and acquisitions. Notable restoration. Appliance software from the smoke and rubble disaster, players include VMware, IBM, HP and enables an IT staff to activate virtual where you lose the entire data EVault, as well as EMC through its Mozy machines right on the box in the center, to the loss of a single server,” subsidiary and other acquisitions. event of a routine disruption, such as says Mark Jameson, vice president “A bunch of companies have a server crash. The appliance takes of sales and products at nScaled, a made headway in this space,” says snapshots at specified intervals based disaster-recovery-as-a-service Dave Simpson, a senior storage on recovery point objectives (RPOs), (DRaaS) provider. “Not only do IT analyst with 451 Research. “Several the point in time to which systems organizations need a DR plan they can started out providing backup-as- should be restored after a disaster. easily execute for quick recovery, they a-service [BaaS], and are combining The appliance also replicates data to must test it regularly to keep pace with the attributes of virtualization the provider’s cloud, using deduplication continually changing environments.” and the cloud to offer DRaaS.” and other optimization techniques to DRaaS is an increasingly DRaaS differs from other cloud speed transmission. Some systems appealing option. Research firm DR models, primarily through highly feature a unified console that allows MarketsandMarkets predicts that automated DR processes, a hybrid administrators to manage both local global DRaaS revenue will climb from cloud architecture and multitenancy, and remote data protection activities. $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion in supporting multiple customers on Using DR management toolsets, they 2018. Small organizations that couldn’t the same racks to drive down costs. can spin up virtual instances in the afford traditional DR now have an entry point, while larger organizations see the cost and efficiency benefits of moving to a DR services model rather From Lock-Step to Stepping Up than running multiple data centers.

Cloud-Based DR Breakdown Disaster recovery preparation has traditionally been an arduous but necessary Services for delivering DR in IT function. Every organization has applications that are critical to the mission, the cloud, according to Klos, fall but only the largest could afford to do whatever was needed to keep them online. into three primary categories: “A large majority replicated exactly what was on the primary site to a Colocation services: Organizations secondary site, usually their own,” says Arun Taneja, consulting analyst manage DR through redundant at Taneja Group. “Everything on the primary site — configuration, OS patches, settings — had to be in lockstep, and that’s very expensive.” systems at a colocation facility. They That drove even big companies to replicate only their most critical provide their own hardware and applications, typically no more than five. They’d back up other applications software and execute DR themselves to tape and store them with an archiving services provider. based on their own plan. The arrival of server virtualization was a major improvement, because Replication services: A cloud provider IT teams didn’t need to run the same hardware on their primary and works with an organization to secondary sites. They could install their most expensive hardware in their establish roles and responsibilities for main data center and use a virtual infrastructure on a secondary site, DR, and provides the tools to replicate whether their own colocation site or a service provider’s data center. server instances. “IT leaders’ thinking was that if they did have a disaster, they didn’t mind running DRaaS: Providers offer end-to- at slower speeds as long as they were still running and data was safe,” Taneja says. “That was a fundamental change that made disaster recovery available to end, turnkey solutions as well as the average customer, who couldn’t dream of affording it in the traditional sense.” 24/7 recovery support and various testing options. They use proven This evolution has created the current environment, where DR has become methodologies to protect, replicate available as a service from a range of providers and channel partners. Help is available from cloud services brokers, which have access to vendors that and recover systems within specific provide DR components, enabling technologies and end-to-end solutions, and recovery time objectives (RTOs). specialize in choosing the right services to meet a customer’s specific needs. In addition to pure-play DRaaS providers such as nScaled and Peak >

25 COVER STORY | DISASTER RECOVERY

aren’t comfortable with relinquishing physical control of their data. The People think a building has to be underwater or a smoking hole to self-service administrative tools invoke their DR plan. The reality is that human error is the leading included in some DRaaS solutions offer cause of disasters. a level of control and visibility that other outsourced DR models don’t. Many IT departments want to keep -- ANDREW KLOS, Cloud Aggregation Specialist, CDW DR in-house. They’ve invested millions in infrastructure and applications over many years, have large IT staffs with cloud for failover, running a couple of Put to the Test DR experts, and are used to operating VMs or their entire data center until Turnkey DRaaS addresses one of redundant data centers. However, many they can failback. The RTOs they set DR’s biggest problems — infrequent use DR services where it makes sense, for files, databases, applications and or even nonexistent testing. Indeed, including for newer virtual systems servers are backed by service-level testing services can dramatically not yet hard-coded in their plans. agreements, which some providers improve an organization’s ability customize for different applications. to recover from disaster. For its part, EMC takes a “data In its standard package, nScaled, for protection continuum” approach instance, includes three levels of DR to cloud DR. On the backup side, testing. At the highest level, customers DRaaS these include MozyEnterprise, for can test any three servers at any time, user endpoint BaaS; Data Domain, without restriction. Next, they can run TRENDING for back-end storage replication; a full DR test every eight weeks in one Cloud computing, in its current and Avamar, for deduped backup of nScaled’s three data centers. Finally, incarnation, has evolved rapidly of VMware environments and IT teams with few resources can opt to become an indispensible asset other systems to the cloud. for automated testing. In advance of to IT departments. The core cloud services — Software as a Service EMC’s RecoverPoint provides SLA- their normal full test date, they flag all (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service supported point-in-time recovery for servers they want tested, and nScaled (IaaS) and Platform as a Service applications. “Where backup becomes automatically mounts those selected (PaaS) — have split into segments. DR is when you have to recover more with the most current data, activates Disaster Recovery as a Service than a file,” says Mark Galpin, senior them, spins them back down, and (DRaaS) incorporates aspects of IaaS product marketing manager with creates a report detailing any issues. and SaaS to provide organizations EMC’s Data Protection and Availability with cloud-based DR solutions. While Division, which includes subsidiary DIY Disaster Recovery or DRaaS? organizations contract with big IaaS providers for DR, the industry Mozy. “It’s about quickly restoring an DRaaS has several advantages over draws some distinctions between application, a server environment or traditional DR models: no redundant IaaS and DRaaS for DR delivery. an entire data center for operational data center to manage, pay-for-use Pure IaaS is basically blank-slate continuity after an outage.” pricing, faster recovery times, 24/7 computing, storage and other IT Not surprisingly, VMware, with support for more-strategic allocation resources. DRaaS providers bundle its virtualization technologies, of IT staff and provider-supported everything an IT shop needs for figures heavily into DRaaS provider testing. For organizations with no DR — replication, management solutions. The company itself now DR plan, DRaaS can be a lifeline. tools, DR delivery and support — offers replication, failover and DR for “If you go with a DRaaS and offer it as a hosted service. vSphere through its vCloud Hybrid provider, you’ve got their SLAs, Service–Disaster Recovery offering, planning, network operations which complements its vCenter Site center and support,” says Klos. Recovery Manager for data centers. However, moving data to the To learn more about DR, EMC works closely with VMware cloud, especially for transactional check out CDW’s webinar to build data protection for virtual applications, takes considerable “Best Practices for Backup offerings. For example, VMware bandwidth. Further, many organizations and Recovery in Virtualized rebrands Avamar for use in its VMware have concerns about regulatory Environments” at Consolidated Backup product. nScaled’s compliance, data encryption and the CDW.com/RecoveryWebinar. platform, like others, is built on VMware. security of offsite data. Some just