Another DR Planning Reminder – Hurricane Harvey
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Hurricane Harvey is an on-going disaster of epic proportions. Flood waters are still receding in the hardest hit areas of Texas and Louisiana while the remnants of Harvey are dumping rain in Tennessee. The flooding has affected millions of people and the devastation affecting their lives may take years to recover from. Relief agencies that are working to help the victims of Harvey need support now and will continue to need support for many months to come.
In addition to acknowledging the cost in human suffering, we shouldn’t ignore the financial costs dealt to businesses affected by this disaster. Some of these businesses may never recover from this disaster because of the extent of the devastation, and in some cases, because of insufficient disaster preparedness.
The full extent of the damage will not be known for some time, but it is safe to believe that with over 50 inches of rain falling in Houston and surrounding areas, some businesses had their servers and data storage literally underwater.
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Radar Image from Weather Underground on August 25.
I personally have been involved in creating disaster recovery solutions for IT for over 18 years. In this industry, no one welcomes disasters and they are not viewed as events to capitalize on. They are instead taken as harsh realities from which springs renewed desire to improve the way IT is protected and recovered. The lessons we learn from each disaster elevate our efforts to prevent the loss of business critical data and services. And when I say business, that includes government and other organizations whose IT services may be critical to responding to disasters of all shapes and sizes.
Harvey is a reminder that disasters can and will happen and your primary data center could be at ground zero despite your best preparations. Are you prepared to recover from such a loss? Do your disaster recovery (DR) plans do enough to ensure recovery from a total loss of a data center? There are plenty of DR solutions and strategies available today to make sure you can recover from even a regional disaster like a hurricane.
Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that combine servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/DR solutions into a single appliance can help. With traditional infrastructure solutions that have servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/DR as separate solutions, things get very complicated and often very expensive. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides simplicity starting with rapid, easy implementation and ongoing simplicity through unified management, unified support, and seamless scalability.
Scale Computing’s HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure solution is a prime example of simplified infrastructure that includes robust high availability and backup/disaster recovery at no extra cost. HC3 includes incremental backup, replication, failover, restore, failback as native features while Scale Computing also offers disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for organizations who want or need a hosted DR site with their HC3 infrastructure. On top of the native features, HC3 supports a wide variety of third party backup/DR solutions including traditional backup/DR players like Unitrends, zero-downtime and real-time replication solutions like DoubleTake Availability from Carbonite, and newer backup/DR appliance solutions like Restoronix, to name just a few.
If you’ve been watching Harvey and wondering how you can implement a better DR plan that is both simpler and more cost effective, you should be looking at an infrastructure solution like HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure. Scale Computing offers DR planning services to make sure your data and critical services are protected while also providing a DR runbook (also provided with DRaaS) that will be your guide should disaster strike.
