Posts Tagged ‘data recovery’

Alright, so you’ve toiled and slaved and spent countless sleepless nights (and probably countless ducats as well) to launch your shiny new mobile-local-social app that’s turned into the next big thing. Congrats and all. No really..no small feat, this; good work! Though before you pop open that magnum of La Grande Dame, allow me to ask: happy with your disaster recovery plan?

You. Do. Have. A. Disaster. Recovery. Plan. Right??

No? Step into my office. A Disaster Recovery plan is not the sort of thing you consider briefly, only to shove in the corner for a rainy day. All that’s needed is a cut of some errant fiber line, or some natural disaster to come along and your über-popular app could be down. As for you: that’d be time to dust off the ole resume once again. (I’m hearing the faintest sound of a teeny tiny violin playing.)

Let’s avoid this sad-sack scenario then, shall we? The good news is that although DR planning is a serious undertaking which should be performed by – ahem! – professionals, there are a few easy steps you can take right now to help appropriately prepare you for the unthinkable:

• Ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? No, seriously. If that volcano erupts and hot liquid magma melts the datacenter where your servers live, it’s trouble. (Volcanoes do erupt, you know.) You’ll first need to determine how many hours or days your app can be down before your business is irreversibly affected. This is known as Maximum Tolerable Downtime, or MTD.
• Research, research, research. Now that you know how quickly you’ll need to be up and running post-blackout, time to start looking into backup options. If your app is running on, say, Rackspace Cloud, you might want to start by learning about their load balancers-as-a-service, and reach out to your account manager for additional detail and customization. Similarly, if you’re running Amazon AWS, their Elastic Load Balancing offering is where I’d start. (With Amazon, you’ll almost certainly want to work with a company who has experience with tailoring  failover using AWS) Spend your time wisely and dig (and Digg) appropriately. Be super conservative as well – underestimate your MTD by perhaps 30% and ensure the solution you’ve picked can meet this. In writing.
• Go time. Once you’ve selected your backup and recovery solution, time to implement and test. A weekend maintenance window is a good time to test and ensure that your DR system works. Make any adjustments and test again right away. Repeat this processed until perfect.

Keep in mind that his is the quick-and-dirty version of DR planning, but hopefully will give you a rough idea and perhaps serve as a primer regarding how you might approach this very important part of your infrastructure.

So if you’re still asking yourself, should I…?

The answer is simple: you bet your sweet little app!

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Tagged as: active garage, amazon cloud, Cloud services, data backup, data center, data recovery, datacentertrust, Disaster Recovery, DR, marc watley, rackspace

Even if your business doesn’t run on Amazon’s infamous on-demand IT services, you’ve no doubt heard about the recent failure in their Virginia datacenter. As I originally began writing this post – 48 hours after the outage occurred – scores of widely-used social media services like Foursquare and Quora were still down in addition to many other businesses. Exactly. No fun. (My music-tinged brain immediately conjured up images of red-faced, smoking-headed CIOs, syncopated to Adam Freeland’s “We Want Your Soul“, “…No simcard. No disco. No photo. Not here.”) Imagine being responsible for IT at one of these companies during the outage? Yeesh. Hats off to you guys for getting back online so quickly.

Now then, nearly two weeks post ze outage, the question remains on many a CIOs mind: what to do to prevent being affected by future outages? Are Amazon’s and other on-demand services going away? Of course not – their services are simply too valuable for today’s business. Spare-room-based startups and established shops alike use (and will continue to use) these services. The Economist reported in a recent article: “…the global market for cloud services could grow from $41 billion last year to $241 billion by 2020.” That said, options do exist to prevent exploding noggins and grey hairs during an outage. Perhaps not necessarily drag-and-drop simple, but not insurmountable either.  A few suggestions to ponder:

Amazon. Now with fewer calories.

One option to consider would be to migrate your core web services from Amazon EBS (their storage service around which the outage occurred) and diversify to other Amazon services – or to alternative services providers, perhaps keeping some services active at Amazon. Michael Krigsman wrote an excellent article for ZDNet about the outage, offering insight from a CIO perspective and sharing how some Amazon customers escaped calamity by employing diversification strategies.

Move. If you wanna.

You may love the low prices, but I’m sure it wasn’t just me who was reminded of the tried-and-true adage “you get what you pay for” when the outage occurred. (Though in fairness to Amazon, and as has been noted in numerous articles regarding the outage, these types of incidents are actually quite rare.) A rather obvious option would be to consider making a move away from Amazon altogether. This may be something you’ve been thinking about anyhow, and if so, be sure to spend the time and investigate your options. (BTW, if your concerns are specifically around storage strategy and exploring alternatives to Amazon EBS, I’d invite you to chat with my good mates over at P1 Technologies.)

Disaster Recovery

Needless to say, this is the option folks know but don’t really want to hear (and I know you knew I’d be going here). Why? Disaster recovery (DR) is neither a quick or simple initiative, as you likely know. It takes many many hours of planning and asking tough questions – principal among which is, naturally, how long can I afford to be down? The answer to this question – understanding your Maximum Tolerable Downtime or MTD – is an important one: if you’re running, say, a social media, gaming, or music service and using on-demand datacenter services, uptime is more than critical – it’s everything. Even a brief outage would mean disaster…hours of downtime might mean irreversible business failure. No users. No ads. No traffic. Not here. If you haven’t yet gone down the DR road, now would be a fantastic time to begin. And by now I mean right now.

The moral of the story here is that datacenter outages – while very infrequent with trusted players like Amazon, Verizon’s Terremark, Rackspace, and others – do and will occur. The key is to be prepared well in advance so that the effect on your business is minimal to none; have a sound strategy and diversify your core datacenter services. Spend time investigating options. Plan, plan, and plan some more, and be sure to have DR initiatives in place. And as I always say, don’t be afraid to ask for help, especially from professionals who can walk you down the road to smart recovery.

What..still here? Daylight’s a-burnin’ my friends!

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Tagged as: active garage, amazon outage, data center trust, data recovery, datacenters, disaster recover, down time, hosting, marc watley, outages, up time

About a year ago, I was the unfortunate victim of a robbery.  At gunpoint.  Right…no fun at all.  Anyhow, in addition to my wallet, the idiot-with-gun also got my laptop. In an instant, I’d acutely learned the importance of backing up one’s data.

Now truth be told, it could have been much worse insofar as losing laptop data. I’ve used a BlackBerry for years, and so what I’d argue was the most important data on my laptop – contacts, notes (to this day I take all meeting notes via BlackBerry), email, and calendar – was still intact locally on my BlackBerry (which I thankfully kept) and also remotely on my corporate Exchange server.  What was lost however, were scores of other notes, business plans, presentation decks, whitepaper drafts, spreadsheet exercises, some music (sigh) – gone forever in the flash of a second.  I will say that I have benefited from the misfortune – I’ve since used an online backup service – Dropbox – to ensure safe, recoverable storage of everything on my laptop. (This has been a life saver and a service which I can’t recommend enough.)  Also, it was a good excuse to finally make the switch from PC to Mac.  Happiness.

Anyhow, two Captain Obvious lessons learned from this experience:

1. Backup is CRITICAL
2. Anything can happen at any time

These axioms ring even truer for businesses – of all types and sizes – who are increasingly more connected to their customers and suppliers through a plethora of systems and applications. Whether your shop is a five-location dentist practice or a multibillion-dollar technology firm, efficient backup (along with a well-planned recovery strategy) is absolutely key to staying in business.  If you’re reading this thinking, ‘yeah but nothing will happen to me/my business’, I gently refer you to my opening paragraph and also to #2 above.  Several options exist – for personal use, Small/Medium Businesses, and enterprise alike.

A few suggestions:

• Dropbox.  Services such as Dropbox are highly recommended for personal files (good if you need to occasionally share files with others as well).  Simple to use (auto-synchronizes your files between local and online) and runs $9.99 per month (or $99 per year) for 50GB of storage space.  Learn more at http://www.dropbox.com/features.
• Servosity. Servosity provides an agentless, on-demand backup solution suited particularly well for SMB and mid-market enterprise shops. Tape libraries are still in widespread use within datacenters today, and Servosity  provides an efficient alternative to this.  Data is compressed and encrypted before being mirrored to Servosity’s Data Vault.  Backups can be managed by OS or application, scheduled, and restored (downloaded) via secure web browser.  (Disclosure: The company I work for, Datacenter Trust, currently includes Servosity in their services portfolio.)  Learn more at http://www.servosity.com.
• nScaled.  For enterprise shops, nScaled provides a unique approach to backup and recovery: continuous on-premise data protection, offsite backup, and remote failover. Data is continually stored both within your datacenter as well as at a remote highly-available facility.  Using a secure web interface, data can be recovered and restored either on-premise or from the remote location within 15 minutes or less.  Supported server platforms include Windows, Linux, and IBM AIX.  (Disclosure: The company I work for, Datacenter Trust, currently includes nScaled in their services portfolio.)  Learn more at http://www.nscaled.com.

Other solutions to check out include Carbonite, CommVault’s Simpana, and the recently-launched Whitewater appliance by Riverbed Technology. Whether your need is personal or business, there are many options available for synchronizing, retaining, and restoring your data. This is a must-do, as continuous access to personal and work data becomes increasingly important.  As Foghorn Leghorn would say, pay attention when I’m talkin’ to ya!  Don’t let some nutball with a gun or, say, mother nature with an earthquake, teach you a lesson the hard way about keeping ALL of your data continuously backed up and quickly recoverable!

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Tagged as: active garage, backup, carbonite, commvault, data backup, data center trust, data centers, data recovery, data storage, dropbox, flash drives, foghorn leghorn, hosted solutions, IT backup, marc watley, nScaled, riverbed technology, servosity, simpana, storage, technology, whitewater