30 Minute Interview

It’s all about sharing

Pranay Jhaveri, Sales Director-India, F5 Networks Singapore Pte Ltd talks about disaster recovery and F5’s plans for India with Mohd Shariff PA

Pranay Jhaveri

Upgrading disaster recovery capabilities

Due to heightened risk, fiduciary responsibility, increased competition, and regulation, upgrading disaster recovery capabilities is a top priority for enterprises. Enterprises have historically relied on offsite tape vaulting for disaster recovery. However today a growing number of enterprise use more sophisticated disaster recovery solutions such as data replication between the data center and major sites. These enterprises must determine how to optimize the performance of the replication solutions that they already have in order to achieve better recovery time and recovery point objective.

Challenges faced

Applications available across multiple data centers pose a variety of challenges. There is lack of visibility into data center and application health, where it all depends on how one gauges the health of the data center and application. When organizations deliver applications, how does one handle broken sessions, retrieve lost data, and secure personal information. Maintenance overhead prevails, too often—organizations have no choice but to shut down the entire data center to do their upgrades, or about the time it takes to do site to site data replication across the WAN. For instance, if you are an e-commerce site, can you image the lost revenue? Impact of DNS mistakes is another major pain area. Here DNS [Domain name Server] management continues to be the least understood and the most pervasive networking technology used by business. What happens when DNS management errors break entire application infrastructure?

DR’s not about planning for the worst

We normally congratulate ourselves if someone had the foresight and the budget to build another data center in a different geographic site. Unfortunately, it happens either way in most of the cases. Most organizations set up their secondary site in an active standby configuration with a manual recovery process that can be costly and error prone. They experience broken transactions, customer dissatisfaction and downtime costs that severely disrupt their business and decrease profitability.

The ultimate solution

Keeping applications up and running across sites consist of running the treadmill of fixing broken transactions, minimizing customer dissatisfaction and juggling downtime. Using a manual process to solve these challenges can be costly, error prone, and slow, disrupting the business and decreasing profitability. Organizations need solutions that enable them to solve these challenges and provide superior application availability and performance, reduce management overhead and improve operational efficiency. The ultimate solution gives organizations an intelligent way to manage their data centers and the application that they host. They need a way to detect the data centers and application health including any Web services in a composite application. In the event of a problem, the solution needs to automatically and transparently reroute the user to a functional application. Solutions like this need holistic monitoring, client continuity, service management and maintenance, DNS management and security. F5 Network’s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) provides all these solutions for the business. It provides maximum performance. GTM leverages all the benefits of their secondary site in an active-active configuration to holistically manage their application across multiple sites and provide application high availability by tracking and managing multiple data centers, applications, and any Web services that work together within a composite application. It also ensures that user sessions persist in the same site to eliminate broken sessions and corrupted data.