Don't Gamble With Your Recovery Overview
The fundamental challenge When a disaster strikes, companies often discover that they have underprotected some of their mission-critical IT Enterprises no longer view DR preparedness simply as an expensive insurance policy, but as a competitive necessity in a global, 24x7 economy. Stephanie Balaouras, Forrester, State of Enterprise DR Preparedness: Q3 2008 As organizations increasingly rely on IT for their fundamental business processes, the availability requirements for these IT services are increasing. Most organizations have a number of different applications and databases, and a variety of server and storage hardware. Many are exploring new technologies, including server virtualization and thin provisioning. As if that weren t enough, organizations are struggling to find the right people to operate and manage it all. While Disaster Recovery budgets are higher in 2009, they are expected to remain flat or even shrink during the next few years, requiring IT professionals to do more with the same or less. Yet organizations are under increasing pressure to ensure that they have the right level of protection at the right price. Unfortunately, most organizations find their recovery solutions lacking. For example: When asked to estimate their organization s approximate recovery operations success rates, respondents reported a mean recovery attempt success rate of just 83 percent. 1 One in four disaster recovery tests fail. 2 services. Reasons range from an inappropriate assessment of the actual cost of downtime, to failing to revisit recovery time and recovery point objectives despite the introduction of new technologies, to failing to recognize all the threats to system uptime. One of the primary reasons for system failure is operator error, which was shown to contribute to 24 percent of all incidents. 3 While many organizations find themselves exposed to more risk than they d like, these same organizations often spend too many resources protecting applications and data that aren t critical to the organization; for example, backing up data that doesn t change and keeping less important data on primary storage when it should be archived or placed on lower-cost storage. However, the most common problem is operational complexity, which increases administrative costs and reduces productivity. Organizations need to find the optimal middle ground where the right applications are matched with the right level of protection so that less critical assets aren t depleting resources that should be spent elsewhere. Right size your recovery To ensure the appropriate protection of data and applications, organizations need to conduct a business impact analysis of their IT services and classify them based upon the importance to the business. A business impact analysis helps establish recovery service levels, and applications are typically tiered based on their level of importance.
Here is an example of how an organization may tier its applications to right size their recovery. Tier 1 applications are determined as the most critical to the business. Typical Tier 1 applications include databases such as Oracle or IBM DB2, ERP and CRM applications such as SAP, and transaction-oriented applications such as credit card and/or Web applications. For the typical large enterprise, the recovery time objective or RTO (the tolerable amount of application downtime) is less than one hour. In some cases, no more than a few minutes can be tolerated because downtime can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue or worker productivity. For Tier 1 applications, the typical recovery point objective or RPO (the amount of data loss that can be tolerated) is near zero. Tier 2 applications are still important; however, RTOs are commonly about six hours and an RPO of hours can be tolerated. Typical applications that fall into this tier include email (although for some organizations or specific executives, email is a Tier 1 application!) databases and/or applications for less important business processes. Tier 3 applications are those that are not so business-critical, such as a company s intranet, or early-stage virtualized environments. Server virtualization is becoming more critical as organizations start deploying more of it in their organization; however, most organizations are still using virtualization for test and development and less important workloads. With this tier, an RTO of less than 12 hours is likely and an RPO of 24 hours can be tolerated. Of course, collaborative applications such as SharePoint are being used more and more across organizations as their intranet application, so for some organizations SharePoint may be a Tier 2 or even a Tier 1 application. Tier 4 applications typically have an RTO of when convenient and days of data loss can be tolerated. Across each tier, there are different challenges that organizations must consider to ensure that they are optimizing their recovery and not overspending on protection. Or, potentially worse yet, underprotecting and leaving their organization vulnerable to application downtime and data loss.
When protecting applications that fall across the different tiers, typical challenges include: High cost of recovery Meeting stringent recovery SLAs can increase costs, so how can we ensure that we are not spending too much? Storage capacity mismanagement Data growth is not slowing down, so how can we efficiently manage what we have and minimize data growth as much as possible? Operational inefficiency How can we do more with less by eliminating manual processes and automating operations to run more efficiently? Inadequate automation of disaster recovery Can we meet our SLAs if we have a site failure? Will the personnel with the right expertise be available during the disaster? Lack of disaster recovery testing When was the last time we tested our DR plan and did we meet our established SLA? Extended backup windows Are we meeting our backup windows? Or for businesses with global 24x7 operations, do we have the luxury of having a backup window? Complexity of introducing new technologies such as server virtualization Server virtualization has many benefits in terms of consolidating servers; however, how can we effectively manage all of our virtual machines and protect them at the same time? Effective strategies for recovery With leading solutions for backup, archiving, high availability, and disaster recovery, Symantec provides the highest level of protection for your mission-critical assets, as well as strategies for reducing the cost of providing that protection. Symantec recommends three strategies to help you meet the challenges of recovering your IT: 1. Ensure application recovery 2. Optimize information recovery 3. Protect more, store less Ensure application recovery The heart of the IT service is the application. As businesses rely on IT for their critical operations, the recovery times for applications continues to decrease. In the last year, RTOs for mission-critical applications have dropped from 9 hours to 4 hours. 4 However, maintaining the availability and rapid recovery of complex application environments isn t easy. Symantec recommends solutions that will increase reliability and speed recoveries. Automate application recovery For the quickest, safest recovery, Symantec recommends automating application recovery to provide local high availability and global disaster recovery. This will prevent outages ranging from a server failure to a complete site-wide failure from impacting your business. An automated approach, such as high availability clustering from Symantec, eliminates vast amounts of downtime compared to a traditional manual recovery process. To protect the entire application environment, including the database, application server, and Web server tiers, Veritas Cluster Server from Symantec understands the dependencies between these components and coordinates the start-up of this entire IT service in the event of a failure to any of the tiers.
Accelerate application recovery The challenge of reducing recovery times to minutes or seconds can be difficult and expensive; however, Symantec can improve recovery times dramatically. With Storage Foundation Cluster File System, servers in a high availability cluster have concurrent access to the same storage. This means that storage resources don t need to be restarted during a failover, and thus, there is a significant increase in the speed of recovery 90% faster failover than regular HA clustering. Simplify DR testing For most organizations, a test means bringing down production applications as in an actual disaster and incurring the downtime your HA/DR solution is designed to eliminate. But in this 24x7 global economy, no time is a good time for bringing down applications. In fact, in a recent DR survey 5, IT managers said 40 percent of their DR tests impacted customers and 27 percent impacted revenues. As a result, nearly 30 percent of organizations don t complete DR tests more than once a year. To ensure that your disaster recovery solution will work, Veritas Cluster Server is built with non-disruptive DR testing, which allows administrators to do an actual failover of an application to the DR site without having to bring down the production service. Reducing the causes of downtime is another critical aspect of application availability. The largest cause of unplanned downtime is operator error. In fact, 24 percent of all incidents are caused by employees and typically the result of a change management issue. 6 Symantec s Disaster Recovery Advisor is a comprehensive high availability and disaster recovery monitoring and analysis solution that automatically scans the data center to detect continuity risks and vulnerabilities. Customer Profile Application Recovery New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) If the platform we choose isn t right, the Symantec solution reduces our risk. It lets us mount our database on AIX, Solaris, or some other platform. That keeps prices down. And it helps us adapt and stay available. Mike DeSocio, Supervisor of Infrastructure Support. After deploying Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server: RPO improved from 30 to 10 minutes RTO improved from 4 hours to 30 minutes Improved server utilization 25 percent by consolidating from 400 to 55 servers and expect another 25 percent improvement this year Delayed $500,000 of server purchases Optimize information recovery Applications are critical to a business s success; however, without information, an application is useless. A business s information, which would include its intellectual property, is arguably one of its most critical assets. This relationship between the application and the information it holds is interdependent because without the application, the information is next to impossible to use. Optimize information recovery with disk One of the most effective ways to optimize information recovery is to use disk-based data protection. Using disk to either augment or fully replace a tape-based environment not only helps to increase backup and recovery success rates, it also helps to make backup and recovery faster and
reduce data loss. Therefore, disk-based data protection helps to meet both recovery time and recovery point objectives. In an effort to decrease costs, organizations need to map the right disk technology to meet business objectives. Therefore, it is important to choose a solution that provides flexibility to meet all required tiers of protection so your applications aren t over or under protected. For applications that have strict recovery point objectives, Veritas NetBackup from Symantec provides a variety of snapshot capabilities so data loss is minimized. For more critical applications, data can be protected continuously so every write is captured as it happens. This allows you to roll back to any point in time and eliminates the need for scheduled backup windows. Disk-based data protection also allows for granular recovery, so you can back up and store applications once, yet achieve two types of recovery. NetBackup includes granular recovery technology, which provides the full application/image for disaster recovery purposes, and granular files, objects or emails in the event of accidental deletion or corruption. A health check of your current environment, conducted by Symantec Consulting Services, can identify opportunities to leverage disk, and review if your data protection operations are set up according to best practices. Optimize recovery with archiving, search and e-discovery For most businesses, the cost of recovering and reviewing information is a staggering 1,400 times the cost of simply storing it. 7 Today, when a traditional IT department gets an e-discovery or investigation request, it is typically a fire drill that consumes IT resources and derails you from your strategic objectives. Once complete, someone must perform the costly task of consolidating all of the results and processing the information, including deduplicating the data, password cracking, imaging, indexing, filtering, etc. Lastly, e-discovery requests are repetitive as are their associated costs. With Symantec Enterprise Vault in place, you can store, manage and discover unstructured information. Not only can you optimize the recovery of individual files, inside counsel can more effectively control collection and preservation, thereby reducing the amount of data they need to export. Symantec Consulting Services can work with your IT, business, and legal departments to develop and update your records-retention policies and practices for email and other information systems, and specify how these policies and practices should be configured and supported with Symantec Enterprise Vault. Customer Profile Information Recovery ING Renault F1 Team Symantec s leading edge technologies are at the forefront of our business, ensuring all areas from design to racing have quick and reliable access to data, at any time. Graeme Hackland, IT Manager. After deploying NetBackup and Enterprise Vault: Reduced data center loss Maintained a single-button backup and restore capability Managed emails from composition to destruction
Protect more, store less According to ESG, database data is growing at 25 percent per annum, with unstructured data increasing at two to three times that rate. 8 With this data growth and budgets remaining flat or declining, it is imperative that businesses protect more and store less. Protect more, store less with deduplication While disk-based systems are inherently faster and more reliable than tape, acquisition costs can be more expensive. This cost concern is driving customers to adopt technologies such as data deduplication, which reduces backup to disk capacity requirements by eliminating multiple copies of the same data. With NetBackup PureDisk, data can be deduplicated at the media server layer, allowing for disk capacity savings of as much as 50 times. 9 By replacing tape with disk at remote offices, organizations can protect those locations from the data center. Protecting data from a central location can reduce remote office operational expenses by as much as 5 times 10 and WAN bandwidth expenses by as much as 500 times. 11 You can also leverage deduplication to eliminate redundant data within the application particularly those collaborative and increased performance. Vendors such as Data Domain, Falconstor, and Quantum/EMC have participated in this initiative to deliver integrated solutions. Protect more, store less by archiving Government regulations have forced data retention of months, even years, which can dramatically increase storage requirements. According to Gartner, Backup and disaster recovery copies of data need only be kept for a few weeks or months (typically, 90 days or less). Data that needs to be retained for longer periods should be managed via an archive process, often using a tool that is different from the backup product. 12 The most basic savings are gained by efficient utilization of storage. Archiving allows you to move older, less-frequently used files from high-cost disk and archive that information to reduce storage cost while maintaining accessibility via stubbing. This is a common practice for customers who have no email or file quotas in place and their storage is perpetually growing. With Symantec Enterprise Vault, you can reduce storage and server requirements 40 60 percent. In addition, integration with NetBackup ensures rapid recovery of Enterprise Vault environments should a disaster occur and critical archives are impacted. applications such as email to keep data growth at bay. This allows for faster backup and recovery. On the target side, it s advantageous to integrate intelligent appliances with the NetBackup OpenStorage API. Instead of identifying the disk as tape, NetBackup identifies disk as disk, and allows for centralized management, control
Customer Profile Protect More, Store Less ENGlobal The integration of NetBackup PureDisk deduplication technology drove overall cost savings by enabling us to centralize data from both remote offices and the data center into a single, optimized storage system. Searching through old data costs our department approximately $200,000 a year, which will be significantly reduced by Enterprise Vault. Alex Schroeder, IT Manager After deploying NetBackup PureDisk, Enterprise Vault and leveraging Symantec Consulting Services: Projected $6.25 million cost avoidance on outsourcing services over three years Projected payback on data protection solution in less than one year Projected six figures a year in costs savings associated with e-discovery Saved 50 70 percent on disaster recovery site due to lower security requirements enabled by data encryption included with NetBackup PureDisk e-discovery, HA/DR clustering, storage management, and disaster recovery testing. NetBackup, Enterprise Vault, Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server, coupled with a broad portfolio of Support, Education, Consulting and Managed Services provide you with comprehensive coverage to optimize your data center operations. More than half the world s information is protected by Symantec: 99 percent of the Fortune 500 90 percent of the Global 2000 Top 10 leading telecommunications companies Top 10 leading healthcare companies Top 10 leading financial services companies You can rest assured that your data and applications are protected with Symantec. Recover quickly, effectively, and cost-efficiently with Symantec Symantec provides market-leading solutions for data protection, archiving, high availability and disaster recovery. Technologies include backup, deduplication, replication, continuous data protection (CDP), classification, retention, 1 ESG Research Report: Data Protection Market Trends, John McKnight and Mary Johnston Turner, January 2008 2,4,5 2009 Symantec Disaster Recovery Survey 3, 6 2008 Symantec State of the Data Center Report 7 Symantec IRM survey September 2008 conducted by Applied Research 8 ESG Report: Why CIOs Should Look to Data Deduplication, Lauren Whitehouse and Brian Babineau, May 2009 9, 10, 11 ESG Lab Validation Report - NetBackup PureDisk from Symantec: Efficient, Storage-Optimized Data Protection, June 2008 12 Gartner Key Issues in Data Protection, 2009, Dave Russell, March 30, 2009
More information Visit our Web site http://enterprise.symantec.com To speak with a Product Specialist in the U.S. Call toll-free 1 (800) 745 6054 To speak with a Product Specialist outside the U.S. For specific country offices and contact numbers, please visit our Web site. About Symantec Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com. Symantec World Headquarters 20330 Stevens Creek Boulevard Cupertino, CA 95014 USA +1 (408) 517 8000 1 (800) 721 3934 www.symantec.com Copyright 2009 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, NetBackup, and Veritas are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 07/09 20050487