Cloud Computing: The Newest Kid on the Block (Part Two)

By Mike DeNapoli

Part two of “Cloud Computing: The Newest Kid on the Block” focuses on making the switch from physical, in-house servers to cloud computing, and also offers predictions on the growth of this computing methodology.

Switching to the Cloud
When considering a switch to Cloud storage, first if helps to know how much data and time your company can afford to lose to justify a Cloud budget. Two metrics that measure data and time are called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

RPO is the threshold of how much data a company can afford to lose since the last backup. Defining the company’s RPO typically begins with examining how frequently backups take place. Tape backups are usually done only once a day since they are 100 percent intrusive to systems, so in this case, the RPO would be 24 hours. The best disk-to-disk software can detect bytes or blocks of data that change and replicate them in real-time, so their RPO would be zero. However because disk-to-disk requires a duplicate set of hardware and software somewhere offsite, Cloud computing can give you zero RPO without the cost and maintenance of redundant equipment.

RTO is the threshold for how quickly a company needs to have an application’s information restored. Some companies may be able to go a few days without e-mail for example, but restoring from tape or provision servers, storage, networking resources and virtual machine configurations can take considerable time. Cloud computing can automatically failover to applications running on redundant virtual servers in the Cloud so users won’t even know there’s been a problem.

Next it is important to have a process for evaluating providers. There are several factors to consider before making a decision, but start by asking these important questions:
• Can I buy capacity in very small chunks and change usage on the fly?
• Will you bill me only for what I consume?
• Is there a long-term commitment to any specific usage pattern or cost?
• Can you protect all of my servers and applications?
• Can you protect the OS and applications as well as the data?
• Can I actually failover to the Cloud without downtime?
• Can I test the failover process to ensure the servers are recoverable?
• Do you provide a mechanism to recover the data/servers without lots of downtime?
• Do you provide free idle bandwidth, with (nearly) unlimited burst capacity?
• Do you have data centers located in multiple countries?

Finally, determining which servers need to be protected is additionally important. But with the cost of Cloud storage so low, businesses can afford to be safe rather than sorry.

Eye on the Future
According to a recent article in the New York Times, “I.B.M., a bellwether in the corporate technology market, forecasts that it will have $7 billion in cloud revenue by 2015. Of the total, $4 billion will be customers shifting to cloud delivery from the company’s traditional software and services, and $3 billion is expected to be entirely new business.”

Although change is never easy, especially when it comes to running a business, with technology racing forward at the speed of light change is inevitable when it comes to updating technology.

So start by working through your cost of downtime and estimate the cost of your current backup design. You may discover Cloud computing provides a more reliable alternative to the tape and disk-to-disk storage you are currently utilizing. After all your evaluations, ask the right questions to secure a provider that meets your needs. With inexpensive costs and ease of set-up, Cloud is a worthwhile exercise for organizations of any size.

About the Author:
Mike DeNapoli is a Virtualization Solution Architect at Vision Solutions, Inc., the world’s leading provider of information availability software and services for Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and Cloud Computing markets. For more information, please go to: http://www.visionsolutions.com/

April 17, 2012 – 1:43 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Vision Solutions a Certified Partner for IBM PureFlex System

We’re are thrilled to make IBM’s list of business partners certified on IBM PureFlex System. With this certification, we are excited to change the enterprise IT experience as we know it and welcome our clients to the next era of computing.

As a IBM PureFlex System certified business partner, we are not only able to offer an integrated, expert solution designed to simply address our client’s complex challenges, we will also give our clients the opportunity to increase ROI — by reducing development time and costs and growing business — and tap into the 70% of IT budgets currently devoted to upkeep of current systems for innovation.

After completing extensive training and testing, we’re proud to be certified ready for IBM PureFlex System and confident that our solutions will provide our clients with the level of satisfaction they expect and the level of simplicity they desire.

Vision Solutions Whitepaper: IBM and Vision Solutions application availability and data protection for IBM PureFlex System

April 11, 2012 – 6:17 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Cloud Computing: The Newest Kid on the Block

by Mike DeNapoli

This is the first of a two part series authored by Mike DeNapoli, Virtualization Solution Architect at Vision Solutions, on how the cloud computing paradigm is dramatically changing the corporate computing landscape. 

With the rapid-fire turnover in new technology these days, many must-have, cutting edge models and services are becoming obsolete almost overnight.

Despite well-founded kneejerk skepticism in the marketplace, the heavy marketing of cloud storage on behalf of superpowers Microsoft, Amazon and VMware has prompted businesses across the board to seriously consider utilizing the Cloud in place of tape and disk-to-disk backup.

 A Sign of the Times: Cloud First

In 2011, theU.S.government launched the Cloud First initiative requiring agencies to evaluate computing options prior to making any new investments in IT. They further sweetened the deal by allocating a hefty sum of $20 billion, or one quarter of its entire IT budget to the Cloud computing model.

Aside from putting its money where its mouth is, the federal government also made a bold statement by adopting this initiative: if the Cloud is safe for government use, it’s safe for any business, even those with stringent compliance requirements. Accepting this assumption with open arms, Cloud providers went into development overdrive hoping to snag a piece of that $20 billion pie. As a result Cloud computing should only get better over time. Some changes in Cloud computing that are expected to take place down the road include:

  • Increased infrastructure
  • Lower pricing
  • Efficiency improvements
  • Enhanced security
  • Compliance compatible
  • Agility improvements
  • Innovation improvements

 A Trend toward Zero-Assets?

Gartner, Inc. provided another endorsement for Cloud technology when it predicted by the end of 2012 that 20 percent of businesses will have absolutely no IT assets. They based this assessment on the rise of Cloud computing and other interrelated technology movements, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employee utilization of corporate networks for personal desktops and notebook systems.

It’s a bold statement and if true, what in the world could be driving so many businesses to change their entire IT business models at the speed of light? For many, it comes down to saving money pure and simple, and they’re finding switching to the Cloud seems to be their best option.

Data loss, whether due to a disaster or outage, equates to employee and customer frustration, compliance penalties and general chaos. Frankly, any type of outage can negatively affect a business in lost records and/or permanently scarred transactions and accounting files. With this in mind, organizations are realizing the value in backing up data so they don’t lose money. In the past, this often meant budgeting and spending large amounts for backup infrastructure, such as tape or some configuration of disk-to-disk.

The Trouble with Tape

For many years, tape-based backup was the gold standard for the majority of businesses. Yet, with tape, only the simplest restorations are possible, and only then if everything goes perfectly. In fact, many restorations fail, and even simple failures require a day or two to get new hardware in place before recovery is accomplished, causing frustration, wasted time and additional money.

Some common examples of this are:

  • Failed tapes that are unusable for recovery
  • Loss of data due to time lag between data changing and nightly backups
  • Backups failing due to locked/unreadable files during backup windows
  • Lack of sufficient servers, disk space and software with which to perform restores.

The Cost of Disk-to-Disk

To avoid the problems associated with tapes, many businesses updated to real-time replication and restoration via redundant off site servers. Although the design is nearly fail-proof and more cost-efficient, some downsides include:

  • Extra facilities and equipment, both of which will sit relatively idle most of the time
  • Additional time associated with managing and maintaining the facility and equipment
  • Integration of all the parts into a reliable solution
  • The creation of a peak-versus-average problem. (You pay for peak, but only get the benefit of a very low average utilization since the redundant data center must meet the peak capacity of the IT department, but the average capacity utilization will be minimal). 

With all this in mind, suddenly the prediction that businesses are racing to unload their IT assets as fast as possible doesn’t seem like such a stretch.

April 10, 2012 – 3:52 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

SSD Storage and Business Continuity – What Should You Be Aware Of?

This is Part Two of a two part series on SSD storage and business continuity.

Solid state storage (SSD) based on Flash memory is now being used in products aimed at the enterprise. These solutions are seen as offering organizations enormous opportunities to improve performance for their critical applications but establishing a resilient environment can be tricky.

In order to make continuity planning simpler for the customer, using one solution to protect and replicate data across multiple platforms is a strategy to suggest. This also has the benefit of being independent of the server or virtualization choices that the customer either already has in place, or is looking to use as part of their new infrastructure.

Selling continuity as part of this new storage strategy can also have a more immediate benefit to the customer. Rather than looking at business continuity or disaster recovery tools as ‘insurance’ in case something goes wrong when the project is fully up and running, you can look at them to help during the migration period as well. By replicating existing data over to the new storage platform, the amount of potential downtime incurred during urge project can be reduced dramatically, which has an immediate benefit for the customer.

The last point for consideration is around what the customer will be doing with their old storage products – each of these will be a substantial investment in their own right. By encouraging customers to look at recycling this storage as part of their business continuity strategy, the customer can make their previous investments go further.

This approach may not be a ‘big bang” project, but in these days, when cost saving opportunities are always welcome, it can be the difference between making a sale or being put on the back burner. By looking at the overall solution, partners can help customers improve their critical performance and their business continuity strategy as well.

 

March 29, 2012 – 1:42 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

SSD Storage and Business Continuity – What Should You Be Aware Of?

This is Part One of a two part series on SSD storage and business continuity.

Solid state storage (SSD) based on Flash memory is now being used in products aimed at the enterprise. SSD offers organizations enormous opportunities to improve performance for their critical applications.

When you have the ability to increase the number of transactions that can be supported, the business advantage should be obvious – but how should you look at the business continuity side as well?

Bringing in any new storage platform will have some impact on continuity planning at the customer – even if it is a straight swap between products, plans will still have to be updated. However, bringing in SSD storage arrays will require more planning than a typical upgrade. Customers deploying SSD arrays that are not part of a broader roll-out will find that their new, faster platform is not protected unless they think ahead.

There is therefore an additional services and consulting opportunity here for channel providers. Rather than just selling storage, this should be part of a wider plan that future-proofs any investment from a continuity perspective as well.

Let’s consider how customers might look to implement SSD as part of their storage strategy. The first option is to move over wholesale to these new platforms; while they certainly offer better performance and the cost to deploy is coming down rapidly, there is still some reticence to bet everything on SSD from a reliability point of view. Wholesale changes tend to be expensive as well, so the customer has to set more budget aside.

The second option is to implement arrays just to support critical applications. This is the route that most customers will opt for at the moment. However, asking them about their continuity strategy as part of the move should open up the opportunity to provide them with advice on how their current approach will support these new additions. If they are relying on their storage platform to replicate data across, then they will need advice and recommendations on how to proceed in protecting their data across multiple platforms going forward.

March 27, 2012 – 2:06 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Bloated Backups: Three Reasons to Dedupe Data

Say HR emails next year’s benefit package to all employees and the email contains two 5 megabyte PDFs. You’re diligently backing up Outlook so you’ve just backed up 2.5 gigabytes of data from just one email interaction. The average person sends 228 emails per day and those emails likely contain PDFs, graphics, documents, and plenty of LOL cat photos. If you’re backing up every instance of that data, you’re wasting an enormous amount of storage.  And, because we continue to send more emails and more information as the years roll on, you’re going to run out of storage a lot faster than you should – or would if you deduped.

Deduplication comes in a lot of flavors: file vs. virtual tape library (VTL) interface, source vs. target, hardware vs. software, inline vs. post process, fixed-block size vs. variable-block size, etc. While you should evaluate based on your budget, infrastructure, RPO and RTO targets – just remember that the point of any approach is simply to store less data.

If you’re still wondering if you should dedupe your backup data, keep in mind that 1/3rd of all enterprise-scale organizations ranked data deduplication as a priority for the coming year*. So:

Yes, you should be deduping your backups and here’s what’s in it for you:

  1. You’re going to save on storage – some estimates say you’ll save as much as 70%.
  2. Deduping data improves your recovery time (RTO) in case of a server failure.
  3. Deduping shrinks backup windows – which improves your recovery point (RPO) in the case of a server failure.

Want to learn more about the most streamlined backup and disaster recovery software on the market? Click here for a free trial of our most popular solutions for Windows, IBM i, AIX and Linux or download our guide to Assessing the Financial Impact of Downtime and learn more about your unique RPO and RTO.

*(ESG Research Report 2011 IT Spending Intentions)

March 23, 2012 – 2:07 pm Categories: High Avaialibity | Post a comment

Four Things You Need to Know about Protecting Hyper-V

Consolidating systems increases the concern for system outages caused by application, OS, hardware, storage or site failures. Here are four things you need to know about protecting your Hyper-V servers:

1. Not all data needs protection

There’s no reason to protect every bit and byte on your servers.  Use the two primary measures of determining criticality, RPO and RTO, to decide what data and applications need to be protected. To learn how to calculate RPO and RTO.

2. Native backup might not be enough

Determine if Microsoft’s native backup provides enough protection for your RPO and RTO thresholds. Backing up virtual machine disk files from the host presents challenges that do not allow a simple file-based backup process to preserve the data consistency of the virtual system. Point-in-time host-based backup of running virtual machines and their applications can be performed with the Microsoft VSS feature and a VSS-aware backup application. However, many operating systems do not have access to Hyper-V integration component software and cannot participate in the native backup process, so alternative solutions are required. Even for those that can participate, native backup may not be enough to protect production systems because of the long RPO inherent with backup technologies.

3. You might need real-time protection

If native backup isn’t enough, real-time protection is required to provide instant protection and recoverability for Hyper-V virtual machines. We’re partial to Double-Take Availability, not only because we lovingly made it, but because it integrates with the Windows 2008 host operating system and protects Hyper-V virtual machines, VHD files and configurations settings in real time. It also replicates changes to the virtual machine as soon as they occur, which provides a complete protection solution for your production machines. If a virtual machine fails it can be restarted on the target Hyper-V host and continue processing as normal without having to wait hours, as is required when restoring from a backup. The RTO of Double-Take Availability protected virtual machines are measured in minutes, or about as fast as the virtual machine can boot.

4. Branch office protection might be easier than you think

Recovering remote office Hyper-V virtual machines from a centralized location is quite simple. The architecture works fundamentally like the Double-Take Availability disaster recovery architecture since it spans wide area networks. This lets you over-subscribe your disaster recovery plans for remote sites since most geographically distributed remote office networks are far enough apart that a geographic disturbance won’t affect them all simultaneously. Thus, you can further reduce your total cost of ownership by centrally provisioning enough hardware capacity to handle failover of one or two of your remote sites.

Want to know more about protecting Hyper-V? Check out our free whitepaper.

March 21, 2012 – 2:17 pm Categories: Hyper-V | Post a comment

Can You Afford BES Downtime?

So your entire team’s productivity has been increased with BlackBerry handhelds – but what if the server and software that powers these devices goes down? What’s your worst-case scenario? In a system outage, it’s not likely that users will even know that the communication link is down.

  • Employees may make critical decisions based on a lack of information
  • Customers and partners may simply assume your company is unresponsive

It might be easily overlooked, but a downed Blackberry Enterprise Server might cost you more than a few angry phone calls. It could have a major impact on your bottom line. While the entire IT group may look at individual components as being “up” or “down”, users and customers only understand whether email is working or not.

Since BES relies on the data that resides on the email server (email messages, addresses, public folders, etc), part of ensuring the availability of wireless email access is the absolute requirement to provide protection for the email server itself. Without an Exchange or Lotus Notes system to interact with, BlackBerry Enterprise Server will not function. Regardless of specific goals, all availability efforts start by ensuring the resilience and availability of all email data. Having a readily available copy of this data is the first step in protecting these applications.

In the past, the two most common options available for data protection were tape backup and hardware disk mirroring. However, these two options have some major shortcomings that may result in less-than-satisfactory results when deployed as part of a high availability solution.

Once a BlackBerry is on a carrier’s network, it is linked to RIM’s Network Operating Center (NOC), which has direct connections to all of RIM’s carrier partners and to BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) all over the world. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) software is middleware that links handheld devices to corporate email services such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Typically, BES is deployed on a separate server from the actual mail server, although Lotus Notes does allow it to coexist on the same server as users’ mailboxes. When ensuring the availability of BES, typically there are the same challenges as with the email server itself. The BES protection requirements are likely going to be the same as email requirements, so similar solutions can be deployed. BES uses Microsoft SQL Server to store its configuration information. Without this data, the entire BES application is inoperative, resulting in BlackBerry users being “down”. While BES is designed to allow a simple manual failover process of its services to a backup server should the production server or services fail, it does not provide data replication to protect against a failure or corruption of the SQL Server database. In order to have a fully protected BES environment, you must ensure that the SQL Server data is readily available and that a redundant server with the BES application installed is ready to go should it become necessary.

Whether BES is running on the mail server or on a separate server, a high availability solution can ensure that all of the data is protected on a secondary server and can facilitate the failover should a failure occur.  First, a new server (either a physical machine or virtual machine) is provisioned at the recovery site.  BES is then installed on the new recovery server along with any requisite software such as Microsoft SQL Server. Then HA software is installed on both the production and secondary servers.  When not being used for failover purposes, the BES services are stopped on the secondary server and are automatically started only when an outage occurs.

Want to know more about how downtime might affect you? Download What Every Senior Executive Should Know about Downtime.

March 19, 2012 – 2:12 pm Categories: Data Recovery, High Avaialibity | Post a comment

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Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

Some organizations like the idea of working with just one vendor – there is sort of a “one stop shop” convenience perception, possible volume discounts and the benefit of having to manage fewer relationships. However, if the relationship goes bad, or the innovation goes bad, the project is going to be totaled and the price is going to be high.

Proprietary architectures, if even narrowly adopted, can be big revenue generators for the companies that offer them. Proprietary storage environments, for example, represent a secure revenue stream for vendors.

Lock-in is such a lucrative strategy that vendors will go to great lengths to design their products to work better together than they would with a competitor’s equivalent product, even if it means a longer development cycle and a bigger development budget.

The thing is, vendor lock-in is good for the vendor – not for you. Vendor lock-in leaves you vulnerable to rising costs, underwhelming innovation and can mean a lack of flexibility in the future.  Some say vendor lock-in is about evaluating the risks – but for most the risk is simply going to be too high.

In contrast, software based replication solutions like those offered by Vision Solutions can work with any storage hardware and can even support environments where two different hardware vendor SANs exist.  Hence, you’re not locked in, locked out or locked up.

Want to know more about the risks of vendor lock-in? Download our free whitepaper Addicted to SAN.

March 14, 2012 – 2:27 pm Categories: Data Recovery | Post a comment

Are Exchange DAGs Enough Protection for SMBs?

For small to medium enterprises with a single-server infrastructure, maintaining the availability of Exchange 2010 is a critical part of keeping the business running.

The Database Availability Groups (DAG) feature that is built into Exchange Server 2010 may not be the most effective solution when it comes to disaster recovery and high availability because of the need for advanced infrastructure, resources and expertise.

While DAG is an option for Exchange Server resiliency, it has limited functionality for business continuity and can be a drain on resources. When determining what’s best for your organization, consider that:

  • DAGs require precise network configurations and the same OS release and version installed on the source and target. Not only does this require additional software, it requires additional management.
  • Managing DAGs is complex. You’ll have the complexity of managing a Microsoft Cluster implementation plus the additional load of DAGs.
  • DAGs are not optimized for WAN protection or disaster recovery – they take up significant network and bandwidth resources and require server investments for remote sites.
  • DAGs can be out of financial reach for SMEs – licenses are steep and limited to 5 databases (Standard Edition). Enterprise edition allows protection for up to 100 databases, but the price is exponential.

If your enterprise can’t take advantage of DAG, download our free whitepaper on Exchange 2012 Advanced Protection.

March 12, 2012 – 2:35 pm Categories: High Avaialibity | Post a comment

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