High Availability/Disaster Recovery

High Availability
In order to make data truly available, local protection of storage sub-systems and its relevant components is just not sufficient. It is unequivocally critical to plan protection for servers and site outages as well. Outages can result from a number of predictable or unpredictable events such as human error, earthquake, fire, storm, war, terrorist act, etc… It is vital to plan and prepare against these types of business disruptions when designing a company's data center.

The first step in ensuring information availability, outside of storage sub-systems, is making servers highly available. Clustering technology allows for servers to be grouped together in a manner such that if a server in the cluster, called a cluster node, fails or an application running on the cluster node fails, then either the entire node or just the failing application can be restarted on another node in the cluster, thus minimizing the outage of information. There are a number of cluster configurations that have evolved over time and continue to offer better and improved methods of server clustering.

Disaster Recovery
The next step in ensuring information availability and operation continuity, after implementing local server and storage protection, is to implement site protection procedures. This can be accomplished by creating a replica of information at a remote site that can act as a backup site. As mentioned earlier, site outages can result from a number of predictable or unpredictable events such as human error, earthquake, fire, flood/storm, war, terrorist act, etc… It behooves corporations to implement plans to protect themselves from going out of business as a result of an unforeseen disaster.

Conclusion:
In today's digital economy where more and more business is being conducted electronically, much of any business' success depends on the effectiveness of its IT infrastructure. While delivering the highest quality of service remains a major objective for most businesses, cost containment has become an equally important imperative. To remain profitable and stay ahead of competition, businesses need to architect a storage plan that can effectively manage current and future growth, improve availability and reliability of services, increase utilization of resources, and deliver full protection from disasters - all within a given cost structure without exceeding budgets.