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Storage Holds Key to Quick Recovery of Business

Posted on February, Tuesday 21, 2012 By itVAR News Network

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Quick and responsive storage systems that are intelligent in nature and turning out to be more than critical when it comes to helping an organization move from a disaster recovery mode

As enterprise customers move on to address bigger challenges in IT infrastructure related issues, it is getting important for them to understand and comprehend the importance of basic building blocks of any IT systems – the storage and proper backup. Not only is it critical to back up the entire system as opposed to just data files, but backing up is only half of the equation.

It is also extremely important for enterprise customers to consider the recovery side of the operation. All the businesses need to have continuity, this is irrespective of what vertical they are coming from. When operations are disrupted by a server failure, companies need to recover quickly and return to normal operations as soon as possible. Recovering data, applications and system files over an internet connection sounds easy enough, but it can be a painfully slow process.

Now let us consider the download bandwidth of a network connection, and think of how long it would take to restore everything currently stored on an enterprise server. Also consider that in the case of a disaster, internet transmission infrastructure may be damaged or missing as well, so this also needs to be planned in advance.

If there is no internet connectivity, offsite information will be unavailable no matter how well it is backed up. Experts recommend that onsite storage would be better in such situations, but file-by-file recovery, even with on-site availability, is still a time-consuming process. Acting on the advantage for the enterprise, a file-based disaster recovery solution isn’t the only option. Streamlining the IT infrastructure, a number of IT professionals opt instead for a block-based method of information recovery for an enterprise.

While file-based recovery is only possible so long as applications or systems are available to process the recovery, block-based methods typically image and store an entire disk. The speed of block-based disaster recovery methods makes them superior choices for business continuity.

Additionally the type of storage infrastructure should be carefully considered. Some disaster recover solutions are appropriate only for physical systems, and some new solutions are only appropriate for virtual systems.

On the other hand, some backup and disaster recovery solutions are capable of protecting physical as well as virtual machines but we should remember that not all solutions will handle both. Most importantly, if an enterprise uses hybrid physical and virtual storage infrastructure, it is best to consider whether it is important to have multiple solutions, or to standardize on one.

As IT managers and CIOs looking for the optimal solution for the needs of their particular businesses, IT professionals should carefully consider these issues. The stability of the back up storage media is important, back up frequency limitations are important, as is the speed of recovery and the storage infrastructure.

Hence, IT managers must carefully weigh all of these considerations against the total cost of the disaster recovery solution in light of the individual needs of the company and the type and quantity of information to be provided by the vendors. Moving forward, storage systems are more often than ever being seamlessly integrated with the IT infrastructure demands of an enterprise and this is the best way forward for the betterment of the industry and its specific verticals.

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