Ultan kinahan dr - minasi 2010

Disaster Recovery PlanningAre you covered?
Minasi internet Meeting 2010
Ultan Kinahan
kinahan@live.com

Who am I?
Ultan Kinahan
Born & Raised in Ireland & moved states side in 1992 the week after I finished college & started working in a bar in Greenwich Village NYC… Landed first role in IT here in late ‘92
Currently;
Regional IT Director of Brown & Brown Insurance Co.
Previous roles included:
AOL – “Mapquest, Digital City & Moviefone”
Network Admin for a realty firm in NYC
Multiple Consulting positions

What constitutes a disaster?
Disaster is Natural, Recovery is Superhuman!
A disaster is an unplanned event that interrupts normal business operations.
Types of events
“Acts of God”
Floods
Earthquakes
Volcano's
Snow Storms
etc.
Man Made
Acts of Terrorism

A few phrases we've all comes across
Risk Management
Business Continuity
Disaster Recovery
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The target time for making an application available
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The age of the data recovered
Data Center
Where we store all our toys.

What is DRP (Disaster Recovery Planning) ?
Essentially the breakdown goes:
RM (Risk Management) drives BCP (Business Continuity Planning)
BCP (Business Continuity Planning) drives DRP (Disaster Recovery Planning)
DRP – Mainly where the IT comes into play and involves: Planning and implementation of procedures and facilities for use when essential systems are not available for a prolonged period of time

What is BCP (Business Continuity Planning) ?
Business continuity planning
Is the creation and validation of a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical (urgent) functions within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption. The logistical plan is called a business continuity plan.
In plain language
BCP is working out how to stay in business in the event of disaster. Incidents include local incidents like building fires, regional incidents like earthquakes, or national incidents like pandemic illnesses.

A few Statistics
In 2009 Symantec released the results of its fifth annual Global IT Disaster Recovery survey;
According to the report, 93% of organizations have had to execute their DR Plans and the average cost:
USA: $287,000
Canada: $496,500
The average budget for disaster recovery initiatives worldwideis $50 million USD – Not a lot really!
Average time it takes to "achieve skeleton operations after an outage" is 3hours.
Average time to be fully "up and running after an outage," the average is 4hours, states the report.

A few Statistics - continued
Executive-level involvement in DR plans is rising.
In 2007, 55% of respondents reported DR committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director
this dropped to 33 per cent in 2008
The number rose to 67 per cent in 2009
DR "becoming a competitive differentiator“ within organizations – especially in the financial sector
Also driven by budgets, Upper management making sure IT spends wisely in the current economy

Disaster Recovery Planning Objectives
Develop the ability to recover key business functions following a disaster
Recover systems based on a timeline as defined by an Internal Audit of operations
IT Infrastructure (12-24 hours)
Processing System (24-48 hours)
Email (4 days)
Financials (5 days)

What is mainly affected?
A Business Impact Analysis is essential to determine what core business functions would be most critical to restore following a disaster.
Internal Audits are one of the best options.
Typical findings;
Financials (accounts receivables, accounts payable, etc)
HR/Payroll (Payroll, Benefits processing, etc)
IT Infrastructure (to support the business applications above)

What Systems or Services are Required?
Outline all business critical needs for restoration of services within the timeline determined by the analysis.
Servers
Desktops
Laptops
Networking Gear
Data Lines
Software
Home Grown Apps
Vendor Based Apps
Vendor Contact List
Etc…

What mediums are available?
Portable & Low Cost Options: Has its benefits
CD’s, DVD’s
USB Sticks or Drives
Tape
Disk
Local Replication
Other Options
Application Replication (Local site or Site to Site)
Site to Site Replication (Branch site or Colocation)
Cloud Storage or hosted applications
Thin client computing – VDI

Mmm, What do I need to start?
First things first…Funding Approval!!!
Purchase new storage, servers, software, licensing etc.
Can you use existing (non-production) systems at a second data center?
Data lines
Configuration of servers, software & storage
Setup external access ports for failover
MX Records, Terminal Server, Citrix, VPN etc.
Testing failover

Bandwidth – The Replication Challenge
If you're lucky enough to get 70% of the bandwidth usable! you're likely to see transfer rates for a dedicated connection similar to those in the table below.

Bandwidth - Continued
Reasons for loss of bandwidth:
The provider. In most cases with your standard T1 at 1.5MB your lucky to get 1.3MB then you have…
The asynchronous replication engine is often based on a protocol, protocol converter
Application running on top of IP or TCP
Transport protocol overhead
Replication protocol overhead

Option – Double-Take
System Friendly Asynchronous Replication
Low CPU Overhead
Defined Memory and Disk Usage
Write Order Intact Replication
Bandwidth Friendly Data Movement
User-definable Replication Sets
Compression, Scheduling, Scheduled Bandwidth Throttling capabilities
Point-in-Time Recovery
Integration w/Volume Shadow Copy Services

Application Failover
Source
Target
Replication
Failover Monitoring
IP ICMP or Heartbeat Monitoring
Detect Failure in Seconds or Minutes
Users can reconnect within minutes of failure
Failover can occur across a LAN, WAN and even NAT
Failover more than one Server Identity to the Same Target Server
Failover Scripting for Custom Configurations

Application Failback
Source
Target
Restoration
Replication
Failover Monitoring
Failback Source Identity
Bring Source Application Online
Users Reconnect Within Minutes
Recover or Replace Source Server
Restore Data to the Source Server
Start Replication and Resume Failover Monitoring for Continued Protection

Value of Automated Site Recovery
VMware Site Recovery Manager provides cost savings from:
Reduced recovery infrastructure requirements
Fewer hours spent creating and maintaining DR plans and processes
Significantly reduced cost of DR tests; eliminates IT staff overtime and application impact
Recovery in a matter of hours, not days or weeks – greatly reducing the financial exposure a company faces during a major outage
The following captures an estimate of the cost savings provided by SRM when used to recover from a major outage or disaster
Company that does $25M in revenue a year = ~$96k/weekday. Assume that SRM can achieve RTO of 12 hours instead of 72 hours compared to traditional DR plan.
Value of Lost Revenue
Value of Lost Time by Workers
$96,153
2.5
X
+
500
2.5
=
X
$300/day
X
X
$ 615,385(per disaster)
X
Days of
faster recovery
Number of
workers
Lost revenue per workday
Days of
faster recovery
Cost of worker
wages

Failover Automation
Detect site failures
Raise alert when heartbeat lost
Initiate failover
User confirmation of outage
Granular failover initiation
Manage replication failover
Break replication
Make replica visible to recovery hosts
Execute recovery process
Use pre-programmed plan
Provide visibility into progress

Testing
Testing is key to success of any DR Plan no matter how big or small the environment
According to Symantec’s annual Global IT Disaster Recovery survey One in four DR tests fail. This marks an improvement, however, when compared to previous years.
In 2007, 50% of DR tests failed
In 2008, 30% of DR tests failed
and 25% in 2009
Symantec continues to say, that only 15% report that they never experienced a failure in test.

Q&A
Any questions?

Contact Information
Ultan Kinahan
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Kinahan@live.com

Ultan kinahan dr - minasi 2010

by Nathan Winters

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