How One Company Built a Business Case for Its Disaster Recovery Highway
In a previous blog, Dr. James Tu, the Information Security Officer at a real estate services company, discussed how he had sought out an affordable and workable enterprise-wide disaster recovery solution from an uneven landscape of replication products and found one that met his needs right under his nose. By turning on a feature in InMage Systems' Profiler which he had previously obtained to measure data change rates on his application servers, he converted it into InMage Systems' fully functioning replication software, Scout. But now he still had to assess how well Scout would fit into his existing infrastructure and then build the business case to justify it.
To verify Scout's replication capabilities, one of the tests that Dr. Tu performed was to replicate data between the source and target and then verify he could recover the replicated data at the target site. A key Scout feature that he examined was Scout's s ability to support the creation of virtual mount points at the target site. To create this virtual mount point, Scout would periodically introduce a marker into the replication stream on the source so that the target would know that the replicated data was consistent and recoverable and could know the appropriate point to mount the replicated data by looking for the markers.
Something else Tu uncovered that he did entirely anticipate was how this virtual mount point feature was going to solve other business problems. He had discovered during his business impact analysis phase that a number of his production databases were experiencing performance issues. These performance issues were specifically showing up when his company ran reports against these databases.
Using Scout and its virtual mount points feature, Tu could replicate the production database to a target. Once replicated, the application team could mount this database on the target server and use the available compute power on the target servers to generate these reports. This reduced the load on the production databases since reports no longer needed to be run on them. Instead he could make use of the available computing and capacity resources at the target site for tasks that were important to the business but not mission-critical which helped to contribute to his business case for purchasing Scout.
He also found that by using Scout's virtual mount point feature eliminated his need to rely upon storage system snapshot tools which also helped to cost-justify the solution. Going forward he no longer needed to license snapshot software from storage vendors for application recoveries but could instead use Scout for the same purpose.
The final way he discovered that Scout could cost-justify itself was that it could also eliminate his need to pay for backup licenses on every application server. In the same way he was running database reports on the target servers in his DR site off of Scout's virtual mount points, he could also run backups off of these virtual mount points as well. This meant all he had to do was purchase a backup software license for the target server which further reduced his ongoing operational costs and helped to cost-justify his purchase of Scout.
As Tu discovered, business continuity software such as Scout is providing value well beyond just creating fast and affordable DR for the majority of his corporate application servers. Tu started out using Scout to measure data change rates and then eventually evaluated it based upon its ability to deliver an enterprise-wide DR solution. However he ended up partially cost-justifying it based upon the number of day-to-day operational issues it solved in his company. While Tu is still looking for InMage to provide better integration with existing backup software, he was able to successfully put down the foundation of a DR highway for his company while partially cost-justifying it through the creation of a more stable and functional environment for his current backup and reporting requirements.
In part 1 in this 2-part series with Dr James Tu, Tu discusses the factors he considered before starting to build a DR highway for his company.
To verify Scout's replication capabilities, one of the tests that Dr. Tu performed was to replicate data between the source and target and then verify he could recover the replicated data at the target site. A key Scout feature that he examined was Scout's s ability to support the creation of virtual mount points at the target site. To create this virtual mount point, Scout would periodically introduce a marker into the replication stream on the source so that the target would know that the replicated data was consistent and recoverable and could know the appropriate point to mount the replicated data by looking for the markers.
Something else Tu uncovered that he did entirely anticipate was how this virtual mount point feature was going to solve other business problems. He had discovered during his business impact analysis phase that a number of his production databases were experiencing performance issues. These performance issues were specifically showing up when his company ran reports against these databases.
Using Scout and its virtual mount points feature, Tu could replicate the production database to a target. Once replicated, the application team could mount this database on the target server and use the available compute power on the target servers to generate these reports. This reduced the load on the production databases since reports no longer needed to be run on them. Instead he could make use of the available computing and capacity resources at the target site for tasks that were important to the business but not mission-critical which helped to contribute to his business case for purchasing Scout.
He also found that by using Scout's virtual mount point feature eliminated his need to rely upon storage system snapshot tools which also helped to cost-justify the solution. Going forward he no longer needed to license snapshot software from storage vendors for application recoveries but could instead use Scout for the same purpose.
The final way he discovered that Scout could cost-justify itself was that it could also eliminate his need to pay for backup licenses on every application server. In the same way he was running database reports on the target servers in his DR site off of Scout's virtual mount points, he could also run backups off of these virtual mount points as well. This meant all he had to do was purchase a backup software license for the target server which further reduced his ongoing operational costs and helped to cost-justify his purchase of Scout.
As Tu discovered, business continuity software such as Scout is providing value well beyond just creating fast and affordable DR for the majority of his corporate application servers. Tu started out using Scout to measure data change rates and then eventually evaluated it based upon its ability to deliver an enterprise-wide DR solution. However he ended up partially cost-justifying it based upon the number of day-to-day operational issues it solved in his company. While Tu is still looking for InMage to provide better integration with existing backup software, he was able to successfully put down the foundation of a DR highway for his company while partially cost-justifying it through the creation of a more stable and functional environment for his current backup and reporting requirements.
In part 1 in this 2-part series with Dr James Tu, Tu discusses the factors he considered before starting to build a DR highway for his company.
Leave a comment