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FalconStor has released a new video about the benefits of incorporating disaster recovery automation into DR plans. The video shows how DR automation is able to simplify complex recovery processes, ensuring a smooth recovery of operations after data loss or corruption, equipment failure, or even a complete site outage.

In the event of disaster, businesses must perform dozens, if not hundreds, of steps to bring back their systems and continue with their essential business practices. A misstep in the recovery process caused by human error, a process flaw, a routing issue, etc., can delay recovery time objectives (RTO) by hours and cost exorbitant amounts in lost revenue.

As Wikipedia notes, full backups had been the traditional approach to protecting large data sets, but the problem is that, in today’s high data growth and demanding 24x7 environment, full or even incremental backups take time that is just not available. Multi-tasking or multi-user systems will constantly be trying to send writes to data that is being backed up.

The traditional approach to this problem is to temporarily disable write access to data during the backup, by quiescing the application or
by having the operating system enforce exclusive read access. This works when regular downtime is acceptable, but 24/7 systems cannot bear service stoppages. To avoid downtime, high-availability systems may instead perform the backup on a snapshot—a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in time—and allow applications to continue writing to their data. In some systems once the initial snapshot is taken of a data set, subsequent snapshots copy the changed data only and use a system of pointers to reference the initial snapshot.

FalconStor^® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) with RecoverTrac™ technology has been chosen as a finalist in the backup and disaster recovery software and services category in Storage magazine’s and SearchStorage.com’s 2011 Products of the Year competition. This category covers backup and recovery software, cloud backup and recovery services, disaster recovery (DR), snapshot and replication, electronic vaulting, and archivers. FalconStor CDP was chosen for its unified backup and DR, local and remote data recovery, and its ability to provide automatic service-oriented recovery with RecoverTrac. The RecoverTrac tool simplifies and automates complex, time-consuming, and error-prone failover and failback operations of systems, applications, services, and entire datacenters, making FalconStor CDP the most comprehensive disk-based data protection system for backup and DR available.

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:

If you picked up this month’s issue of Storage magazine, you likely noticed the article by Jacob Gsoedl titled, “Blueprint for cloud-based disaster recovery” (page 21). You also might have noticed my quote in the piece, which detailed different options for disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud (page 27).

Gsoedl notes that there are lots of different ways to do DR in the cloud. He ably discusses the pros and cons of managed applications and managed DR, back up to and restore from the cloud, replication to virtual machines in the cloud and back up to and restore to the cloud.

For that final option, I told Gsoedl that, “several cloud service providers use our products for secure deduped replication and to bring servers up virtually in the cloud.” I’d love to expand on that statement, if I may.

As the article explains, these recommendations all offer attractive elements for companies, depending on their needs, resources and recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements. What it didn’t get to, however, is that the huge opportunity in cloud-based DR, regardless of the specific method employed, is to change the back up paradigm itself.

The cloud expands the opportunity to stop talking about just protecting specific files or data blocks and start talking about service-oriented data protection (SODP). This is what matters to enterprises, of course. Beyond protecting bits and bytes, the cloud needs to help organizations deliver better service to users.

That’s what FalconStor data protection is about. Our tools deliver cloud-based backup and DR designed with SODP in mind, and any blueprint for cloud-based disaster recovery must have service embedded in its foundation.

First, I want to clarify something: disaster recovery (DR) can mean many things. From my perspective, I couldn’t care less how a storage vendor provides remote copy services – when my critical IT business application goes down, I lose money. This loss, depending on the annual frequency of outages, can range from $10,000 to many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year! This application or service protection is what FalconStor is all about. Delivering this type of solution goes beyond the mere storage and remote replication solutions actively promoted by the major SAN vendors. However, application availability, or resilience, has been around for some time in the form of server clusters.

Data levels are doubling every 18 months. This rapid increase should come as no surprise when nearly everything we do has a digital element associated with it. When we text, we contribute one of 173 billion text messages sent every year. When we buy something, there is a digital transaction; Walmart alone posts 1 million customer transactions per hour. When we check up on our friends, we are one of 600 million Facebook users browsing through 40 billion photos. Apple iTunes recently delivered its 10 billionth download. Amazon now sells 180 Kindle books for every 100 hard covers.

All of this data must live somewhere, and the challenges of storing, managing and protecting all of it is spurring new approaches and architectures. Today, all of us at FalconStor find ourselves in the right time, in the right place and among the right people to create those approaches and make the most of an unprecedented market opportunity.

Comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery and (BCDR) processes and the testing of these systems are critical for all companies. Often business continuity is defined as handling the company’s ability to operate, while disaster recovery (DR) stands for the ability to restore full operations. However, for IT, implementing BCDR plans is overwhelming and complex. The sheer amount of IT infrastructure components that are involved in the process makes it almost impossible to manage. For instance, in a recent survey by TechTarget, only 41 percent of IT executives said they successfully recovered all their applications during a test of their BCDR solution and 54 percent reported testing their BCDR plan twice a year or more. These numbers are disturbingly low, as recovery time is everything and effective testing improves your recovery time.

I find it quite interesting in my travels how some folks are drinking the Kool-Aid that tape in general, and VTL in particular, are dead-end technologies. The argument is that tape sucks for backup, is hard to manage, and you need a LOT of it – so just backup to disk, dedupe, and be done with it. The argument against Virtual Tape Libraries is, why put in a technology that looks like tape if your goal is to get away from tape backup? Sounds like a good argument, right?

Except for some fairly important points.

I sat down today to write part two of my CIO Zone article about disaster recovery (DR) automation that addresses the cost factors of DR deployments. But after being glued to the news for the past few days and weeks following the nature-caused disaster in Japan and the human-caused disaster in Libya, I’m humbled by the human cost of these disasters and saddened by the tragic turn taken by these two very different catastrophes.