Session: INF8939
4 Step Program for Success
- Define – Gather requirements – RPO/RTO
- Research and design – look at various technologies
- Acquire and implement – Document
- Test and operate – Continuous testing, continuous research
Disaster recovery and business continuity
- DR is recovery of data
- BC is the full business process of recoverying
Define Requirements
- What are you trying to protect? apps, VMs, DBs, etc.
- What are you protecting against? data loss, data corruption, disaster, etc.
- What is your RPO? zero, minutes, hours, days
- What is your RTO?
- How long do I need to keep data? retention policy, archiving, etc.
Protection Tiers
- Tier 1 – mission critical
- Tier 2 – Required for longer term business continuity
- Tier 3 – Nice to have but not required
Tape Backup
- Cheapest medium
- RPO of hours to days
- RTO – depends on how much data
- Good for archival/long term retention
Hardware Snapshots
- Snap/restore data in seconds from GB to TB
- Application consistent storage snapshots – not needed for all VMs
- Data on primary storage can be expensive
Array Replication
- Async or sync
- Only changed data sent
- Flexible RPO options
- RTO is based on how data is restored
Site Recovery Manager
- Integrates with vSphere for site failover
- Able to test and re-test
- Requires array integration
Continuous Data Protection
- Flexible RPO options
- RTO based on amount of data
- Only changed data sent
Disk-2-Disk
- May be appliance or software based
- Most integrate with traditional backup
- Integrates with CDP
Cloud/Hybrid
- Typically continuous backup so low RPO
- Backup and recovery limited by bandwidth
- May have longer recovery times
- Can take a long time to seed backups
vSphere Metro Cluster
- Zero RPO/RTO (time to restart apps is not zero)
- Great for site protection
- Layer 2 stretching
- No application specific backup/restore
Fault Tolerance
- Limited in supported vCPUs
- Requires high bandwidth between hosts
- Does not protect against OS/App failures
