According to a very recent survey of mid to large Indian enterprises on tech challenges and opportunities by us, we found that DR and BCP was on top of the deployment chart for most mid-sized enterprises. This is a clear indication that even mid-sized enterprises are extremely sensitive about protecting their information so that their business doesn’t come to a stand still. They possibly understand the implications of application downtime for their business.
The terms DR and BCP come together as the former is just a subset of the other. It is just not enough to recover from disaster, but also to swiftly make your organization get back into business. However, one point of differentiation between the two terms is that while the former comprises of a technology strategy, the latter entails more of a business plan.
Why you should consider DR and BCP?
Until recently, there have been just two reasons for having a DR and BCP strategy in place. One, readiness during natural calamities and two, human interventions. A third reason that has been observed more recently is the constant exposure to security breaches and attacks. In a recent DR survey done by Symantec, the most important factor driving the need for DR adoption is virtual or physical security breaches. There is a constant fear of losing critical data among enterprises. Computer system failures, virus attacks, changes in technology infrastructure, pressure from customers and competitors and compliance factors are some other prominent reasons why most enterprises are looking for DR solutions and BCP strategies.
In India, as for the rest of the world, virtualization is a key reason that’s enforcing a majority of mid-sized enterprises to reconsider their existing DR plan. This can be clearly attributed to the challenges that a virtual environment poses because processes that apply to physical environments may not necessarily be applicable to virtual environments. Though imagining a disaster in a completely up and running business environment in normal day-to-day life is difficult but the factors stated above can anytime become a major concern for IT management heads and CIOs. So, it is of utmost importance to have a DR solution and BCP strategy in place.
| It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning, with the aim of avoiding larger losses in the event that the business cannot continue to function due to loss of IT infrastructure and data. Of companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term |
DR BCP Strategy and DR System Tests
We have been covering DR and BCP strategies that enterprises should formulate and what are the best practices to formulate these strategies. A quick recapitulation for the uninitiated - a DR plan has to revolve around four basic pillars of - Data, Equipment, Alternate site locations and People. These factors have to amalgamate well with an organization’s business continuity plan comprising of some key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
As per one of the surveys by Symantec India, 22% of Indian enterprises conduct full scenario DR tests only once a year or less because of perceived fear of business disruption and lack of resources to conduct tests. Reasons cited include: lack of staff availability (56%), disruption to employees (58%), budgetary issues (44%) and disruption to customers (46%). In addition, 32% admit DR testing could affect sales and revenue
Besides, planning and implementation, another very important aspect of the DR-BCP plan is the time-to-time testing of the efficiency of the DR solution in place. What is the benefit of deploying the best DR solution if it does not stand up to expectations at the time of disaster just because of lack of regular test drills checking the efficiency of the solution?
Sanovi Disaster Recovery
Management Suite
Considering the fact that DR and BCP planning is on top of the minds of a majority of IT decision makers, we review some of the latest DR suites available in the market today - Sanovi Disaster Recovery Management Suite.
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Sanovi DR is a management software for system applications and databases that helps in DR infrastructure monitoring, testing and automated recovery of business applications to meet service level objectives. Built on a standards-based platform that leverages your existing database replication and storage subsystem replication solutions, it offers real-time monitoring, testing, reporting,events, policies and automated recovery features needed for end-to-end visibility and confidence in your DR infrastructure. Sanovi DRM overlays on top of existing recovery systems and interfaces with recovery components.
Sanovi DRM File Replication Method
Sanovi DRM uses its replication software called Panaces File Replicator (PFR) which comes embedded with the DRM software. Since PFR runs as a service on the OS, we need to start the Panaces File Replicator Services from the Window Services.
The replicator allows an administrator to distribute content and data across servers and different platforms across different locations (Image 1).The process is called Normal Copy Execution which is a recurring process and terminates during the time of disaster.
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Why Sanovi DRM Suite?
The entire basis of the Sanovi DRM revolves around two main objectives: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is an acceptable amount of data loss from the last good backup prior to the point of failure while RTO is the time taken for the business to be back online after a disaster i.e. the time taken to get back to Business Continuity. Both these parameters are set by the solution provider as per the demand of the client and the criticality of application. Thus, it makes a lot of sense for enterprises to pay just exactly for the desired configuration, policy-based corrective responses and the desired level of criticality of objectives than to go for one standardized fixed price DRM suite.
As discussed earlier in the article, time-to-time testing of a DR and BCP solution is as important as choosing a DR solution. Sanovi DRM suite offers ease of performance of operations of ‘switchback’ and ‘switchover’ that are actually test drills to put DR site in active mode and PR site in standby and vice versa, respectively. This is possible at a click of a button in the application UI. A similar feature is available for making DR active in case of an actual disaster.
| 22% of Indian enterprises conduct full scenario DR tests only once a year or less because of perceived fear of business disruption and lack of resources to conduct tests. Reasons cited include: lack of staff availability (56%), disruption to employees (58%), budgetary issues (44%), and disruption to customers (46%). In addition, 32% admit DR testing could affect sales and revenue |
The dashboard view of the application UI offers a complete one shot overview of the entire network, hardware components and application processes that can get effected during a disaster. This enables real time monitoring of your organization’s complete IT health. Anytime downtime in any of the components is alerted and maintained real time as event logs in the application.
How we tested?
We created a typical disaster recovery management environment, where we have a primary database (PR site) and a physical standby database (DR site) which becomes active in the event of a disaster. The two sites share a common network.
The test bed comprised of 3 machines on our labs network: Machine 1 (Sanovi DRM Server Site), Machine 2 (Production Site) and Machine 3 (DR Site). Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition was installed on machine 2 and machine 3. Oracle 9i database was installed on both machines. On machine 2, the Oracle database was in Read/ Write mode by default. On the other, it was configured on Standby mode. Machine 1 was a Dell R810 server with 750 GB (5x150GB) HDD of which 2 HDD were configured in RAID 1, which was a prerequisite for the installation of Sanovi DRM Server. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 was installed on this machine followed by Sanovi DRM Server installation. Sanovi Agents were installed on the PR and DR machines which can be used to monitor, troubleshoot and perform actions likes switchover (test drill to make DR site active), switchback (an action to roll back ‘switchover’ action making PR site active again), failover (action to make DR site active in a real-time disaster scenario), etc. We created two sites Delhi (PR) and Haryana (DR) on machine 2 and machine 3 respectively. The creation of sites, detecting network components, OS, etc can be done by logging on to the Web-based Sanovi DRM client at: http://:8080/PanacesGUI/
Next we opened the ‘Discovery’ tab to set up our network, and performed the following tests on the Sanovi DRM software:
Test 1: Monitoring/ Troubleshooting Test
To test whether the environment has been configured properly, we performed 2 monitoring/ troubleshooting tests. First, we stopped the listener services of Oracle (Image2).
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The Relationship tab in Monitor window of the Sanovi DRM client showed status of DR site to be ‘inactive’ (Image3). The status refers to the non-working condition of site.
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Then, we stopped DR Panaces Server from Windows Services. The status became ‘Unknown’ (Image 4). This status is displayed when any of the Sanovi services are down.
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Test 2: Switchback/Switchover
We tested features of switchback/switchover which are test drills that an enterprise can perform from time to time to check the DRM solution working in place.
To launch switchover, we opened ‘Test’ tab of the Sanovi DRM Client, and selected ‘Test List View’ and clicked on ‘Start Test’ against ‘Switchover’ (Image 5). The Normal Copy execution has to be manually stopped before this drill. A workflow got activated (visible in ‘Workflows Action’ tab) which ended by making DR site active changing its status from standby to read/write mode. During this process, archive logs and redo logs from the DR site get populated to those of the PR site.
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‘Switchback’ operation can be similarly launched and it reverts the above action (Image 6).
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Test 3: Making DR server active by making PR server unavailable
To test the DRM solution, under a real time disaster scenario, we disabled the network card of the PR site, in a way,making the production server unavailable. DRM client ‘Monitor’ tab displayed ‘Inactive’ status. In the event log, the issue with time-stamp and severity got registered and the status of the functional group changed to ‘Degraded’ (Image 7).
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The Normal Copy execution was terminated manually and to make DR server active, the ‘Initiate Failover’ was launched in the Manage tab (Image 8).
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The process runs a workflow (Image 9) which finally makes the DR site active and the database gets into Read/ Write mode to accept new records in the database.
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Sanovi DRM at what cost?
Sanovi DRM Enterprise edition is available in the following license packages options: Sanovi DRM Recovery Monitor and Manager, Sanovi DRM Drill Manager and Sanovi DRM Advanced Reporter. Pricing of the enterprise edition is based on the number of servers, number of database instances and number of storage based replication instances. Customization of Sanovi DRM to meet customer business needs is offered on a time & material basis. Sanovi also offers an Easy DR package where customers with less than 3 applications can deploy a complete DR solution that offers monitoring of RPO, automation of failover recovery and includes Sanovi’s replication software for under `5 lakhs.
Go ahead to make your enterprise disaster proof and BCP ready!
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The content for this article is sourced from PCQuest Visit their website: www.pcquest.com
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