TRADITIONAL DISASTER RECOVERY

When it comes to disaster recovery, the cure can sometimes be worse than the ailment. In the throes or aftermath of massive system failure, conventional disaster recovery solutions are supposed to initiate controlled shutdown of surviving IT systems at the production site and perform scripted bring up of standby systems at a protection site, as seen below.

The fail-over procedures are usually difficult to plan and test. Even if all goes according to plan, it is often necessary to abort surviving processes at the production site. After bring-up of the protection site, networking changes must be made to connect surviving clients with the newly activated failover systems. And, once business processes resume using infrastructure at the protection site, returning them to infrastructure in the original production site is no easy task.


Soila Pertet and Priya Narasimhan - Causes of Failure in Web Applications

While the majority (80%) of downtime is planned, the remaining 20% unplanned downtime can have disastrous financial implications. Conventional disaster recovery only addresses the most infrequent causes of disasters, that being hardware/utility failures, and complete site failures. DataGardens provides a next generation business continuity solution that it protects against and effectively minimizes all forms of downtime, including human error.

DataGardens WAVE™ offers a full suite of business process protection (BPP) services that help administration minimize all forms of downtime for critical business processes. After all, whether triggered by a true site-level disaster or by far more common events such as data corruption, software failure, or even routine datacenter maintenance, downtime can still result in serious losses for a business.

DataGardens WAVE™ software is deployed either on a commodity server or as a virtual appliance in conjunction with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Suite. It works to sustain and restore business processes through a wide range of contingencies that would otherwise result in extended downtime. It can act at the level of individual computing resources, groups of related resources, or at the level of entire sites. It can work before a disruption even occurs to evacuate live virtual machines from one site to another and allow them to continue operation without transaction loss or re-boot. DataGardens WAVE™ can also rollback data volumes and virtual machines – with processes still running – to a selected instant before data was corrupted or lost. And it can easily restore operations to a primary data centre after a disruption event has been resolved.