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 The
dawn of the Internet age and the attacks of 9/11, have ensured
that most CIOs spend sleepless night pondering over how to
ensure business continuity. T Srinivasan chalks out
guidelines that must be adhered to when creating a business
continuity plan
The
city never sleeps, so goes the marketing slogan of Citibank.
This cannot be truer for IT managers today as they battle
to keep up with the speed and demands of the Internet age.
The drive for total 24x7x365 access to information, regardless
of planned or unplanned obstacles, is rapidly becoming priority
number one in most IT operations, with the focus shifting
from disaster recovery, or how long it takes to get a company
back online after a disaster, to business continuity.
Business continuity is the process of ensuring the company’s
revenue stream by providing optimal data access and utilisation.
Both, the definition and process, contain elements of more
commonly used terms such as high availability, mission critical,
fault tolerant, and continuous availability. But for today’s
info-dependent businesses, more simply, business continuity
equals revenue continuity.
Historically, standard disaster recovery methods have focused
on the ability to successfully copy data onto tapes, catalogue
the tapes, and then archive them in the event that they were
needed. However, with the growth of information far outpacing
the technology curve of tape copy speed, IT managers are continuously
faced with a common dilemma: which data gets backed up and
how often? Every minute taken to ‘recover from disaster’
will result in both lost revenue and opportunity.
The demand for information access is coming from both within
and outside the corporation, and users are demanding continuous
availability. They don’t want to hear if the outage was
caused by a server failure, planned maintenance, a system
upgrade, a tornado or El Nino’s latest weather tantrum.
Where there was once a clearly defined list of mission critical
applications, there is now a blurring effect of user-defined
requirements and classic high-profile applications. In the
past few years, storage has completely shed its image as a
simple piece of add-on hardware. Enterprise storage has now
become the centre of a solid IT infrastructure and its impact
is being felt throughout the data centre. This pillar of information
technology has revolutionised and virtually eliminated the
need for disaster recovery.
A Bullet-proof Plan
In the course of planning and implementing a successful Business
Continuity Plan (BCP), the CIO, CFO and the data centre manager
all have a vested interest in ensuring that the strategy supports
the organisation’s main business interests. The bottomline
of any BCP must be the relationship between information access
and revenue. A successful BCP should consider and proactively
address any and all possible disruptions to an organisation’s
information flow. To do this, it must include an enterprise
storage solution that has the following characteristics:
* A remote mirrored data facility that is synchronised
to ‘live’ production data
A BCP must include enterprise storage software that provides
an online, host-independent, mirrored data storage solution
that duplicates production site data to a remote storage facility.
This facility can be located in the next room or across the
country. The software will enable a fast switchover to the
remote copy of the production site data in the event of a
planned or unplanned disruption to information flow.
* Create and utilise multiple real-time copies of production
data
Today, IT managers are demanding not one, but multiple copies
of their production data to not only back up their critical
data, but also refresh data warehouses, test new applications,
implement decision support, achieve Year 2000 compliance and
deal with European currency conversion.
By creating additional real-time copies of their production
data, IT managers can run production applications and point-in-time
backups simultaneously. Armed with multiple copies of their
data, they can schedule multiple processes against the same
data in parallel and enable 24x7 availability for critical
databases.
* The ability to migrate data between different hosts and
operating systems
Businesses must continue through changes and advances in technology
such as data centre expansions and system upgrades. Companies
cannot afford to disrupt their operations to migrate information
from older mainframes to newer UNIX or Windows NT environments.
Specialised enterprise storage software allows for the movement
of data from one storage system to another without affecting
information access.
* Automatic failover and load balancing capabilities
A BCP relies on innovative software that automatically and
efficiently balances workloads between the server and the
enterprise storage system while offering path failover to
alternative data paths, ensuring that mission critical applications
stay running and businesses continues to operate without interruption.
This software’s load balancing feature increases information
access performance by automatically distributing data traffic
across all available data paths. The path failover capability
provides a higher degree of business continuity by eliminating
the possibility of application failure due to a server data
path failure. Data availability is improved by automatically
and non-disruptively re-directing the workload from a failed
path to an alternative data path.
In conclusion, business continuity and ultimately revenue
continuity are dependent upon adopting a competent and comprehensive
enterprise storage strategy. Only an enterprise storage solution
can deliver the properties discussed with the promise of business/revenue
continuity that is desired by IT managers and deliver unfettered
information access.
The author is country manager, EMC
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