Today’s Disaster Recovery Maze

Ah, the good old days. Planning for disaster recovery, if it occurred at all, was one of the easier things an IT manager had to do. Of course, things have become steadily more complicated over the years…

This is absolutely true and of course means that your systems and application design must now include DR provisions up front. The days of getting to DR once the system is up and running are long gone.

(Via computerworld.co.nz)

Adding to the confusion has been a steady change in the meaning of “disaster.” Ten years ago, a four-hour outage might not have even been noticed by users or customers; today, it could cost you your job. As a result, it has become vastly more difficult to prepare and test disaster recovery plans, and increasingly unlikely that you will go to bed at night feeling 100% sure that all your IT assets are protected.

Companies are dealing with these challenges in various ways. Some are reaching out to external parties for help with disaster recovery planning and hot sites, to which computer processing can be moved quickly in an emergency. Others have pulled back from these arrangements, saying they can better handle the complexity of disaster recovery in-house. Still others are essentially redefining disaster recovery by substituting notions of “disaster avoidance”.

Jerry Grochow, CIO at MIT, illustrates the problem this way: “I once counted a dozen different boxes that had to be up for [an application] to work from end to end, and that’s not unusual. So you ask your SAP application programmer, ‘What’s necessary to recover your system?’ and you don’t necessarily get the full picture, because the programmer doesn’t realise that the authentication server needs to be running so someone can even log on, and it’s running in a different data centre.”

The challenges are legion. Schneider National in Wisconsin, at one time contracted with a service provider for a disaster recovery hot site but recently decided to set up its own second datacentre to serve as a recovery facility. “Ours is a very complex and highly integrated technology environment,” says Paul Mueller, vice president of technology services at the trucking company, which has 36 locations in North America. “As complexity has increased, so has the difficulty associated with hot-site recovery.”

Virtual headaches

Rod Flory, CIO at Lennox International, in Texas, says the heating and cooling system company has been rolling out server virtualisation software to increase the efficiency and flexibility of its servers. But that has complicated disaster recovery planning, he says.

“With VMware, we are changing our server platforms more frequently — not adding servers, but changing memory, the number of CPUs in them and so on,” Flory says. “So quarter to quarter, our environment looks different, and keeping up with that on the hot site is a challenge.”

Flory says he tests his disaster recovery plan “religiously” once a year, and it’s not a trivial effort. “It’s a project,” he says. “I take five people and set them aside for a few weeks.”

A contrarian view

“I’ve been in IT for 33 years, and I don’t believe disaster recovery is getting harder at all,” says Rod Hamilton, CIO of health insurance provider UnitedHealth Group International in Minneapolis.

A huge drop in the cost of communications: “Now, real-time backup to a remote site is economically feasible.”

Business process outsourcing and offshoring: “In order to offshore a process, you have to make it portable, and as soon as you make it portable, it’s easier to recover,” Hamilton says.

Web-based applications: “It’s possible, with redirects, to move the back end somewhere, and users on the internet are none the wiser,” he says.

And he says moving to web services eases the burden of supporting and recovering desktop systems, because web portals can deliver functionality to clients without application software having to be installed on them. “I’ve lived through the main evolutionary moves in application deployment, with traditional mainframe systems requiring support at the centre but virtually none at the desktop, through client-server, with elaborate needs to manage software at each desktop, back full circle to the web,” Hamilton says. “I view web technology as a return to the good old days, from a management perspective.”

See original article by Gary Anthes Framingham here.