The following is an excerpt. Click on the link at the base of this text to register and download the full white paper in PDF format.
According to process improvement guru Geary Rummler, any “organization is only as good as its processes.” This is particularly true in the rapidly-changing and mission critical area of run-time IT operations, where even short-term failures can mean big-ticket business losses.
As the data center becomes highly virtualized, and more and more business applications require near-continuous availability, the demand for faster, easier, and less expensive recovery solutions has never been greater. Can you respond with confidence to a component, application or complete site failure? More importantly, can you respond quickly enough? Have you tested your recovery procedures recently? Have you defined clear recovery metrics for each business application and technology component? Are you leveraging virtualization effectively in your disaster recovery planning? And, most importantly, does your IT organizational structure support your disaster recovery strategy?
Traditional disaster recovery solutions target a limited set of static devices or applications, are often prohibitively expensive, and rarely address the human processes and workflows that are critical in a failure situation. Every datacenter has multiple operations silos (server, network, storage, and database teams, for example) and recovery often requires many stakeholders to be notified of and verify a failure, determine the cause, agree on a solution, and obtain the necessary approvals to initiate a fix. This end-to-end process is often poorly documented, difficult to test, and quickly becomes out-of-date with every application upgrade or technology refresh.
This white paper will outline a solution to disaster recovery that combines both technology and process improvement approaches and recognizes that neither alone is sufficient. We will address the impact of virtualization technology on workload portability and the benefits as well as the remaining operational challenges of the flexibility provided by virtualization. This will set the stage for the critical role of process improvement and automation in any disaster recovery effort. Finally, we will detail a successful client implementation of a unified approach to disaster recovery that marries a comprehensive process automation approach with a powerful suite of technology tools and applications to achieve dramatic improvements in overall availability with measurable, contained costs.