It's Time to Contemplate Consolidated Recovery

Bounce the phrase "consolidated recovery" off of most individuals in IT and you are just as likely to get a blank stare as a good answer as to what it means or how to accomplish it. Most IT staff keeps so busy on a day to day basis just managing their assortment of backup, clustering and replication products that they never get much beyond focusing on the protection and recovery of each application. So for them to contemplate the consolidation of protection and recovery using just one methodology has more than likely not even crossed their minds.

Most organizations have different tiers of protection and recovery simply because that it is the conventional wisdom of how they should approach data protection and recovery. For example, organizations use:

• Backup software to protect applications that can typically withstand longer outages (two (2) hours or longer) and/or are tolerant of recoveries of application data that is hours, days or even weeks old.
• Storage system-based replication software to replicate data from one storage system to another (usually located at another site) for applications that they need to recover in minutes to hours
• Clustering software that is either operating system based such as Windows 2003 Microsoft Clustering Server (MSCS) or Windows Server Failover Clustering or replication software that is part of an application such as Microsoft Exchange's Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) or Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR). These clustering and/or replication technologies provide recovery of the application and/or application in minutes or tens of minutes.

So if such a product did exist, it would have to satisfy all three of these different approaches to data protection and recovery. Each one addresses a specific business need that would not disappear if they were consolidated. So some key attributes that such a product would need to possess include:

• Be cost effective. This is probably the biggest point in the minds of end-users. The primary reason that organizations continue to use tape instead of disk is that backup is viewed as an expense and right now the last thing any organization wants to do is spend more money on backup. Since this product would need to protect everything from lowest tier to the highest tier application server, it needs to be sensitive to the cost constraints of these lower tier application servers which make up the bulk of servers in most organizations.
• Simple to install, configure and manage. IT needs less complexity, not more, and while a consolidated recovery product sounds great on the surface, if they have to baby sit it all day long, what does IT gain? Whatever the new product looks like, it cannot require more time to manage and ideally should require a lot less while delivering the benefits of these other solutions.
• Create a point in time snapshot of their application data. At a high level, this is what backup software does on a daily basis even though rarely does anyone refer to it this way. Organizations will continue to need a static point-in-time copy of their data so they can recreate what their environment looked like at that point in time should a data corruption occur or they are subjected to an eDiscovery search when they need to substantiate who knew what and when.
• Replicate data locally or remotely irrespective of the application or operating system. As organizations continue to move up the stack in their application server tiers, some applications will require near-immediate recovery (within 30 minutes to an hour) either locally or remotely. So the product must provide asynchronous replication and support data recovery anywhere they need it when they need it.
• Provide near-real time failover. Clustering software is often put in place based on the assumption that it provides real-time failover. While this is true in some cases, if more organizations look closely at how the clustering software on their mission critical servers is configured, it is likely configured in Active-Passive mode where if one node fails, the other takes over the application processing within minutes at best and can take more than an hour in many environments.Any new solution should therefore meet these requirements of recovering an application in minutes or tens of minutes locally or remotely.
  

There are obviously other requirements that such a "consolidated recovery" product would need to have. But from these points, one can begin to get a picture of what a product that delivers "consolidated recovery" would need to look like. In short, it has to deliver on the best elements of backup, replication and clustering software without requiring all of the associated costs and management overhead that managing them individually entails now. In a forthcoming blog, I will take a look at how InMage Systems' Scout is already positioned to deliver on this emerging concept of consolidated recovery.