Falconstor Community

In 1989, while working at Archive, the world leader in quarter-inch tape drives, Bernie Wu and I handed over a floppy disk and a QIC-02 controller to an obscure company in Roslyn, New York. In two weeks' time, a young developer named ReiJane Huai, integrated that code with his invention and delivered to us the world's first client/server tape backup application.

While Bernie and I continued to struggle with engineering delivery schedules at Archive, Cheyenne Software and ReiJane exceeded our expectations and rapidly turned ARCserve into a viable tape backup solution.

Little did I know that this rapid engineering development style was the hallmark of one engineer and a harbinger of many events to follow. In the early years of my time at Cheyenne, an amazing pattern emerged. I would visit prospects, secure requirements, and Rei would turn the code around often before I left the customer site.

 I love the data protection space. How many disciplines can be reduced down to two simple metrics? The metrics I speak of are recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). These two measures truly break the entire process down to its bare fundamentals: 

• RPO refers to data at risk measured in time. For example, an RPO of 60 minutes indicates that you could lose up to an hour’s worth of data or all of the data generated in a 1-hour period. In more simple terms, the RPO is determined by how frequently the backup operation runs.
• RTO is a target. It indicates how much downtime you are willing to suffer before a complete system recovery. An RTO of 180 minutes means you will need to wait 3 hours before you are up and running again.

I just returned from Asia where I was fortunate to have a number of conversations with IT professionals from Seoul and Kuala Lumpur. One thing I observed, which I obviously think is worth repeating, is the confusion surrounding Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. The confusion is that many people consider them to be one and the same. They are not.

In simple terms Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is working out how to stay in business following a disaster. Disaster Recovery (DR) is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or to the continuation of technology infrastructure operations critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster Recovery is an integral part of any BCP and the part that is overlooked on a regular basis. In sum, these disciplines go hand in hand and when they do not, companies can suffer tremendous losses.

Here is a recent example of a failed BC/DR Strategy:

My father was a coder. As a member of the Apollo Mission, he worked with thousands of other dedicated engineers to safely place the first man on the moon. At the age of six, I watched my dad, his crew cut team of chain-smoking TRW programmers, and friends and neighbors huddle around our RCA television. When Apollo 11 touched down and Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, my father exclaimed, “The world will never be the same!”