Point Product Complexity Precludes Companies from Achieving Enterprise Business Continuity

A survey that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Storage Magazine indicated that DR testing is not routine for all business. That's probably the understatement of the year. Of those users surveyed, fully half (48%) do not regularly perform testing and, of those that do, they most often test those applications deemed "mission critical".

The bigger question is why are companies still failing to conduct business continuity tests in 2008? There are more data protection options than ever from which companies can choose and the costs for hardware, software and network bandwidth are significantly less than what they were 5 - 10 years ago. My thoughts are that the real reason enterprise business continuity remains so elusive is that companies find the complexity associated with using multiple point products precludes them from even attempting to test their business continuity plan and the thought of doing so enterprise wide is seen as impossible.

Consider how most companies attempt to perform enterprise business continuity now: Host-based software, storage hardware appliances and backup software are the three products that companies typically use for enterprise business continuity. Yet there are inherent problems with using all of these products when trying to deliver enterprise business continuity.

For example, to deliver business continuity using host-based software, companies need to license the software for both the source and target servers. The problem that emerges here is that host-based software is often tied to the host operating system. This prevents companies from creating a many-to-one scenario where data on multiple, different operating systems is replicated to one common platform. Instead each source host requires another host with a like operating system as a target in order to deliver business continuity. Even in this scenario, this only delivers business continuity for a limited number of applications or servers, not the enterprise.

In response to these difficulties, storage hardware appliances have emerged as an alternative means to deliver business continuity in an operating system agnostic fashion. Storage hardware appliances eliminate the requirement to have servers with like-operating systems as sources and targets while giving companies the flexibility to replicate data to remote sites.

But again, implementing and managing storage hardware appliances does not deliver enterprise business continuity, it only delivers business continuity for those servers using that appliance that may leave LAN attached servers unprotected and unrecoverable. Further, companies may find that the storage hardware appliance do not provide the recovery features that specific application servers need.

Backup software is the most prevalent method that companies use to provide business continuity though this option also has its fair share of problems. Primarily it is designed to provide once-a-day backups and manage tape libraries, not deliver simplified, near real-time business continuity.

In this respect, InMage Systems' DR-Scout addresses the concerns raised in Storage Magazine's survey as it provides companies an alternative means to deliver enterprise business continuity. Aside for its architecture that provides a single point of administration, support for multiple operating systems and LAN or SAN attached servers, it is designed with enterprise business continuity in mind so that the recovery testing is simplified, verifiable and data can be recovered either locally or remotely.

The idea that DR testing and business continuity is not routine is still an unpleasant reality for too many businesses and enterprise business continuity is still not feasible for most businesses. But for companies to move past just recovering some of their applications some of the time means they need to start to look past point products that only provide a partial solution. Looking to InMage Systems' DR-Scout will give companies the enterprise business continuity option they need without requiring them to make unpleasant decisions about which data and applications are more or less important than others.