Private Cloud Recovery Services
January 17, 2012
Despite all the hype of Cloud Computing the reality is that most large enterprises are still only at an early stage of adoption, mainly focused on applying virtualization internally to their existing application estate, what’s called Private Cloud.
This does achieve many business benefits but isn’t Cloud in the sense of outsourcing to a remote provider.
However although organizations aren’t yet ready to put their crown jewels entirely into the Cloud, it doesn’t mean that externally hosted Clouds don’t offer some kind of value to this scenario; indeed doing so is the first and primary goal of our ‘Cloud BCP‘ best practices…
Private Cloud Recovery Services
If you have been actively virtualizing your enterprise applications then one new capability available to you is the ability to use new virtualization-centric tools for adding value in these areas.
For example Data Gardens offers software for ‘Live Migration Management’, which can be applied to these Private Cloud scenarios to offer related Recovery Services for business continuity protection purposes.
Conventional approaches are about ‘DR’ – Disaster Recovery, protecting either at the level of IT infrastructure (servers and storage) or at the level of individual applications like MS Exchange. They replicate disk changes to a remote site, meaning they have little ability to protect active business processes, requiring slow and manual restarts to restore operations nor do they protect the entire enterprise application portfolio.
In contrast Cloud BCP harnesses the evolution of virtualized applications to enable more dynamism and portability of enteprrise software, so that it can quickly and easily moved between data-centres at the click of a mouse.
Data Gardens deploys a ‘WAVE’ Node virtual appliance on to your internal VMware vSphere cluster, and then replicates between customer sites and a central data center managed by Cloud Providers. Each pair of WAVE Nodes typically manages up to 20 active VMs, delivering feature benefits such as:
- WAVE – to Protect virtual IT infrastructure (VMs and data volumes)
- Live Process Protection (LPP) for synchronizing both disk and active state information with a recovery site
- Live VM migration back-and-forth between sites and to the Cloud Provider
- Live Rollback of servers and data volumes with active processes still running
- Fail-Over of groups of VMs and data volumes to a remote site.
- ‘Fail-Back’ of VMs and data volumes together with their active processes to the original production site after a disruption event is resolved
- Enterprise-class business continuity with recovery at the site, group, or resource level
- Configurable RPO with no data loss for most failure scenarios
- RTOs of a few minutes
- Automatic failure detection and reporting
- Live recovery audits
Telco Cloud Services
This type of service is the ideal way for Cloud Providers to enhance their portfolios.
- A Cloud BCP service based on live migration of VMs to and from customer premises
- Cloud Providers charge customers through a standard SaaS model, a monthly fee for each protected VM
- Operates as a multi-tenant service
- The system can cover all of the application portfolio and scale to protect thousands of sites
- It deploys non-disruptively without agents in guest VMs
- Java console and RESTful API for 3rd party portals
Critically the service deploys with next to zero interuption for client and also service provider. There is zero downtime on-boarding of guest VMs and data volumes, an automated installed downloads and activates ‘WAVE Node’ VMs.