june 6

Small companies need DR, too
Today's OSs offer mirroring and replicating options
Computerworld Opinion by Jim Damoulakis, GlassHouse CTO

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=
viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=disaster_recovery&articleId=9000963&taxonomyId=151

Over the weekend, I saw a good friend who happens to be the CIO of a medium-size nonprofit organization with several locations around the country. We trade stories from time to time, and on this occasion he was telling me about his plans to improve disaster recovery capabilities. Coincidentally, on the previous day, I had been discussing disaster recovery (DR) with a prospective client from a multibillion-dollar oil and gas company, and, listening to my friend, I was struck by the similarity of their needs. While clearly of differing orders of magnitude in terms of numbers of servers and volume of data, their requirements seemed virtually identical.

Much of the work that we do at GlassHouse focuses on issues facing large IT organizations. In the case of DR, a common scenario is to define and develop recovery policies and plans as well as architecting and implementing infrastructures to support these policies. Technologies employed often include a combination of split mirror volumes and array-based replication to a hot site to ensure recoverability within a given recovery time objective and/or recovery point objective (RTO/RPO). Often the hot site is a data center at another location within the company.

But what about smaller IT environments? These organizations can't afford the high-end storage arrays and multiple data centers required to provide this level of recoverability, yet many may have similar recovery needs. Not too long ago, they simply would have had to settle for what they could afford rather than what they needed. Fortunately, over the past few years, the situation has improved considerably. A variety of technology options have become available that can provide much of the functionality formerly restricted to top-tier storage.

Since smaller organizations may have only a few mission-critical applications -- perhaps e-mail and one or two other applications --host-based software solutions are one option. A number of host-based replication and CDP (continuous data protection) software products offer functionality that can be combined with operating system-level functionality like Windows Volume Shadow Services to protect these applications. For those needing broader functionality, several mid-tier iSCSI storage vendors offer similar split mirror, snapshot, and replication features at the array level. These options combined with reasonably priced data center space at co-location facilities and inexpensive broadband connectivity mean that small organizations no longer have to compromise when it comes to DR.

Jim Damoulakis is chief technology officer of GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a leading provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.