Balancing RTO, RPO, and budget. Table of Contents. White Paper Seven steps to disaster recovery nirvana for wholesale distributors

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1 White Paper Seven steps to disaster recovery nirvana for wholesale distributors Balancing RTO, RPO, and budget In our last white paper, Thinking through the unthinkable: Disaster recovery for wholesale distributors we urged wholesale distributors to evaluate their readiness to get their businesses back up and running after a major disruption. We then explored the true impact of downtime on businesses. According to a recent Symantec survey of companies worldwide, each such incident costs an average of $287, And a survey by Agility Recovery Solutions found that 81% of unforeseen interruptions caused businesses to be closed for one or more days. 2 With consequences like these, it s obvious that major business disruptions are something wholesale distributors must avoid at all costs. Our prior analysis focused on how to prepare your company for a speedy recovery and discussed three traits to look for in a potential business continuity partner. Even after performing this sort of due diligence, you may discover that the topic is much more complex than you expected. There s an urgency and wish to select the best overall business continuity solution to implement. Unfortunately, there s no such thing as a silver bullet disaster recovery solution that will offer every company exactly the right level of protection. Finding the best solution for your company is a matter of evaluating your needs in terms of three factors: How long you can wait to get all your systems back up and running? This is what s referred to as your restore time objective (RTO). Whether you measure this in terms of minutes, hours, or days, this is the length of time within which any disaster recovery solution will need to restore your business to full operations. How much data you can afford to lose. This is what s known as your restore point objective (RPO). You may decide you re satisfied to recover only the data you generated through the end of the previous business day, or you may determine that you can t afford to lose the records of a single transaction even if it was completed two minutes before the outage. Table of Contents 1 Balancing RTO, RPO, and budget 2 Step 1: Tape backups 2 Step 2: Tape backups with offsite storage 3 Step 3: Offsite network copy 3 Step 4: Warm standby 4 Step 5: Application replication 4 Step 6: High-availability hardware 4 Step 7: Hardware failover clusters 5 Let Infor guide you through the steps How much you can afford to spend on disaster recovery. If money were no object, you would simply buy the most sophisticated business continuity solution on the market and hire the world s most skilled consultants to implement it. More realistically, you ll probably need to decide which features are most important to you as you work within a carefully defined budget. 1. Symantec Corporation. Disaster Recovery Global Data Survey Results. June Agility Recovery Solutions and Hughes Marketing Group Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Survey. Survey report

2 In fact, think of RTO, RPO, and budget as three levers you ll need to move any time you make a decision about disaster recovery technology. A solution that gets you back up and running instantly may not restore as much data as you d like. Another solution may restore much more data, but take longer to do it. And just when you think you ve found the perfect solution for your needs, you may realize that it stretches the limits of your IT budget. As you keep these stipulations in mind, we recommend you use the following seven steps as guidelines to help you approach what we call disaster recovery nirvana a state in which you re completely confident that your business can withstand any obstacle in its path. You need not implement every step here; the point is to consider each solution and choose the one that offers you the ideal blend of RTO, RPO, and affordability. Step 1: Tape backups Tape backups give you a basic, cost-effective level of protection against data loss. They re as simple as they sound: At the end of each business day, your IT staff backs up all of the day s data to a data storage tape. There are limitations to tape backups, of course. After a crash, you ll need to restore your database by uploading data from the tapes, which can be time-consuming. Restoring business operations from tape backups typically takes about 48 hours. In addition, if a system disruption occurs near the end of a business day, you ll lose the potentially significant amount of data your company has generated that day. But tape backups are far better than no solution at all. Any company that isn t taking at least this rudimentary step is leaving itself completely vulnerable to data loss during business disruptions. For many smaller companies, tape backups may be enough. Step 2: Tape backups with offsite storage One of the shortcomings of tape backups is that many companies store their backup tapes somewhere in their offices. What if a flood renders the entire office inaccessible? The tapes will also be inaccessible and may even get destroyed. Some smaller companies try to get around this issue by having an executive or IT leader take custody of the backup tapes. But an employee s garage or car trunk isn t exactly a secure, climate-controlled place to store tapes. That s why it s a good idea to take tape backups one step further by engaging an offsite storage service. These services typically send a courier to pick up your tapes and take them to a storage vault that s specifically designed to keep your valuable business data safe. So, what happens in the event of a business disruption? You call your storage provider and ask them to bring over the tapes you need to restore your operations. You ll have to wait a bit for the tape to arrive and then perform the usual processes to restore your data. And you won t be able to recover the data you created during the day of the crash. But at least you ll know your tapes were kept safe and sound throughout the incident. 2

3 Tape backups with offsite storage can come with a built-in advantage. Some tape storage partners will send a technician to your site to perform the backups and test your backup equipment periodically. This can be a good option for smaller companies that have minimal IT headcount. If you re concerned that insufficient training or an overwhelming workload could distract your staff from performing backups on a consistent basis, this is an option you should consider exploring. Step 3: Offsite network copy The next step in protecting your company from data loss is to take the offsite concept one step further and actually push your backups to a safe location online, rather than transporting tapes. In other words, you store your daily backup file on a disk on your network instead of on a tape. You then transmit the file via the Internet to a server in an offsite location. What are the advantages of offsite network copy? For one thing, there are no tapes to deal with. Although data storage tapes are remarkably durable, there s always the risk of a tape getting damaged or lost in transit. Another plus is that when you re restoring from a remote server rather than a tape, the whole process goes more quickly. There s no waiting for a courier to bring you the right tapes, and the actual restoration process is streamlined. In addition, when you perform nightly offsite backups of your whole network, you can also continue to transmit transaction data to the backup site throughout the day. For example, you might decide to send a transaction log once per hour all day long. In the event of a business disruption, you can restore your database from the last known good file, and then reapply individual transaction logs to restore any lost data from the current business day. In this configuration, you stand to lose no more than about one hour s worth of data. Of course, there are drawbacks to the offsite network copy approach. When you re sending or receiving gigabytes of data over an Internet connection, you may run into network and bandwidth issues. Thus, it s best to do your backups at night when your network activity is at a minimum. Also, restoring all your data from an offsite network copy can be more timeconsuming than restoring it from a tape, but you ll end up losing less data overall. This is a classic case of balancing RTO against RPO to find the best solution for your objectives. Step 4: Warm standby Want to get the same kind of backup you d get with an offsite network copy, but shorten your restore period after a crash? The warm standby approach may be right for you and your business. With warm standby, you keep a redundant server up and running at all times in your server room or data center. This server contains a copy of your full network. As you and your employees work, you send updates perhaps every hour or two to this backup server to keep it in sync with your production servers. If there s a crash, you only lose as much data as your company has generated since the last hourly or bi-hourly update. Your recovery time is much quicker than with offsite network copy because your backup server is already live on your network. But you have to weigh the risk of having your primary backup device housed under the same roof as the rest of your IT infrastructure. 3

4 Step 5: Application replication Companies that are really serious about not losing any transaction data often consider investing in application replication. With this approach, you keep a server up and running in a remote location. This server uses database-level replication to make sure the data from your applications is transmitted correctly. Every time a transaction occurs on your production server, the data is sent to the remote server and applied automatically by a replication agent. Application replication is about the closest thing you can get to real-time replication. There will always be a small amount of latency between your production and backup systems simply because the backup server is running in a remote location. You could still lose a transaction or two during a crash and you ll want to make sure that the data for your last transaction transmitted correctly. But application replication gives you an extremely high level of protection against data loss. Step 6: High-availability hardware Many companies find that application replication meets all their disaster recovery needs within the budget they ve designated. But companies that want to minimize their recovery time from any outage can explore high-availability hardware solutions. When it comes to high availability, redundancy is the name of the game. To achieve high availability, you design your IT infrastructure to have redundant power supplies and redundant network connections. That way, the failure of any one component doesn t bring the entire network to a halt. You should also have redundant storage area network (SAN) connections so that your applications can always connect to your databases. Many companies rely on IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM System Storage Storwize V7000 to enhance these functions. Step 7: Hardware failover clusters Hardware failover clusters give you the closest thing you can find to an invincible IT infrastructure. In a typical failover cluster, virtualization software works with the available hardware to ensure that services will be restored quickly after any failure. You establish a hardware cluster of redundant machines and control them with the virtualization software. Then, when any single component fails, the software makes sure applications can continue to run on the remaining components. For example, IBM PowerHA SystemMirror software can control applications to make sure they remain available to business users even if a single hardware component in the technology cluster fails. PowerHA SystemMirror can simply move the application to another node in the cluster to prevent an interruption in the application s availability. If you lose any data at all, it will be minimal and recovery times become almost a moot point because your systems are so reliable. The only question is how much of your hardware, storage, development, and testing environments your budget will allow you to duplicate in your redundant environment. 4

5 Let Infor guide you through the steps How quickly do you need to get back up and running after a disruption? How much data can you afford to lose? And how much disaster recovery and business continuity technology will your IT budget allow? Don t try to make these decisions alone. Ask Infor for help. Schedule a free consultation with us, and we ll: 1. Listen carefully to your needs and objectives. 2. Help you refine your RTO and RPO goals. 3. Learn all about your environment, applications, and databases. 4. Craft a plan for giving you the level of protection you need. As software providers, we re aware of the many complex interactions between your applications. As IBM partners, we can show you how to get the most bang for your buck from solutions such as IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX, IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), and IBM System Storage Storwize V

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