Disaster Recovery Journal, Spring 2011

DATA PROTECTION
Cost Effective
DR Implementation
With Virtualization

By RICHARD DOLEWSKI

Is your disaster recovery plan set up for “virtual” success or a “real” nightmare? Traditional disaster recovery planning is critical to an organization but not easy to implement. In most production data centers today IT is forced to manage a mixed environment of heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. With business leaders focused on continuous improvement, IT managers are forced to tighten capital expenditures and contain costs while delivering a highly available, resilient, and agile IT infrastructure. In this highly demanding environment, IT staff must also demonstrate disaster recovery capabilities that meet the ever-changing business continuity metrics.

Why do so many traditional disaster recovery (DR) technology strategies under-perform and under-deliver? The simple answer is that a recovery plan using a physical server deployment that is equivalent in number to the production data center can be very complex. Delivering repeatable disaster recovery solutions with non-standard hardware and software platforms with already over-utilized human resources has never been more difficult.

The difficulty is exaggerated when you add additional business applications that require new underlying infrastructure. As companies adopt new business strategies, they often jump directly to a new technology initiative. While such moves often make business sense, they often don’t leave time for realizing the impact to the disaster recovery strategy. Traditional DR strategies require these changes are accompanied by planning, budgeting, and buying twice the required IT capacity. Yes, two of everything! It’s clear that continuous improvement directly impacts capital expenditures for traditional disaster recovery planning.

Traditional Barriers to DR Implementation

1. Cost of solution. The biggest barrier to implementing a solid DR foundation is the prohibitive cost of matching production HW components; e.g. a one-to-one system ratio. This capital expenditure can be difficult to justify. Even when the benefits are clear, these are expensive solutions for any business.

2. Infrastructure complexity. The number of systems to provision can consume valuable recovery time and funding. This is due in part to supporting numerous hardware components with dual maintenance challenges including the need for base metal restore.

3. Reliability and repeatability of solution. Complex solutions are hard to test primarily due to the difficulty of provisioning sufficient equipment to re-create all servers that need testing. Because complex solutions are difficult to test, they are typically not tested frequently, which should leave the business questioning the reliability of the solution.

Relying only on a traditional physical server DR approach can prove to be out-of-reach for many cost-constrained businesses. In a many cases, it can lead a company to compromise on its disaster preparedness – a risky strategy. Instead, companies can chose a DR solution where the costs of implementation and delivery efforts reflect the intrinsic business value of the applications.

Can A Virtual DR Strategy Work For You?

The concept of server and storage virtualization is receiving broad support from enterprises in nearly all market segments. Most IT organizations are embracing virtual server infrastructure technologies as a means to cut costs in their production data centers. This technology is compelling in more than consolidation and server deployment activities; it also holds great promise for making DR a cost-effective and reliable deliverable. By implementing virtualization, you can minimize the number of physical servers needed for DR, which in turn allows for reduced complexity and cost by lowering power and rack space requirements. Virtualization can create significant improvements in the speed and simplicity of disaster recovery and is capable of further reducing recovery time objectives for mission critical applications.

Here are some underlying advantages that server virtualization provides when applied to meeting your disaster recovery requirements:

1. Reduced direct costs. The biggest cost benefit comes from significantly reducing the quantity of physical production servers required for recovery. With virtualization, this becomes a many-to-one ratio. Consider anywhere from 10-40 virtual machines to one physical server ratio, depending on the type of workload.

2. Effective hardware utilization. With virtualization, you avoid the large capital expenditures currently required to deploy under-utilized servers that lie idle in a traditional DR server setup.

3. Standard hardware. All operating systems would see the same
virtual hardware, allowing ease of migration between physical
systems for maintenance or capacity management purposes.

4. Standby operations. With physical to virtual (P2V) capabilities, virtual machines can be pre-provisioned with the operating system, application and system state ready for data to be restored.

5. Easier testing/proven recovery. The simplified DR environment deployment equates to more frequent and thorough testing of the applications. Concluding a successful test, server configurations are maintained and ready for next use.

6. Easier manageability. Recovery of your DR setup and delivery begins with key strokes and mouse clicks allowing for recovery from a remote location.

7. Reduced indirect costs. In addition to space and power savings, there will be a meaningful reduction in needed human resources to deliver in a DR scenario.

8. Handles tougher RPO, RTO. Additional capabilities exist to improve recovery objectives as business needs justify the additional expenditure.

There are, however, some disadvantages to consider with a virtualization solution:

1. Learning curve to implement a new technology. Server, storage and network teams are impacted, creating a potential conflict in traditional administrative paradigms.