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Electronic Vaulting: Among the many paradigm shifts sweeping across corporate America, one of the most dramatic is unfolding in the business continuity industry. It is a recovery option few companies would have considered even three to five years ago – electronic vaulting. Traditionally employed for only the highest-end solutions, electronic vaulting is emerging as a viable option for all environments. The concept of electronic vaulting in the disaster recovery industry is becoming an increasingly popular subject for several reasons: • Massive Amounts of
Data to Manage • New Regulatory Demands • Competitive Pressures Before the arrival of electronic vaulting, all other changes in recovery methodology had been incremental – small but nonetheless significant improvements in slowly reducing the recovery window. The shift to electronic vaulting signifies a leapfrog in the way companies handle, protect and recover information. In order to better understand electronic vaulting and assess its relevance for a particular company, it is helpful to understand the factors causing this new view of recovery options. WHAT IS ELECTRONIC VAULTING? Electronic vaulting is the quickest recovery process now available in the IS environment. Its goal is to reduce recovery time by protecting information and enhancing its recovery. Various forms of electronic vaulting accomplish this by pre-staging operating systems, applications software, and transactional data, and then updating the information frequently. The appeal of electronic vaulting is apparent: By maintaining duplicate data and systems at a recovery site, electronic vaulting can dramatically shorten the recovery window and, in some cases, close it entirely. A NEW WAY OF PROTECTING INFORMATION For most companies, basic decisions about electronic vaulting will depend on their assessment of the importance of the data that needs to be preserved. However, remote storage shadowing or mirroring is responsible for the dramatic change in existing recovery practices. Traditionally considered to be exclusive and high-end recovery options for only the largest of companies, shadowing and mirroring solutions are being reconsidered. There are several converging factors contributing to the shift in the recovery paradigm. They include: • Escalating customer needs, both in end-user
expectations and information as a competitive advantage GROWING STORAGE – INCREASED AVAILABILITY REQUIREMENTS Information storage across heterogeneous platforms is growing by 20-30 percent annually. On top of that, application availability requirements are continually increasing, so that the typical IS environment is in a losing battle with the typical backup window. Users lose too much time backing up their information by traditional means and cannot afford to lose access to their databases for that amount of time. Electronic vaulting has emerged as the only viable option to remedy this situation. Remote Storage Shadowing or Mirroring Although the terms shadowing and mirroring are often used interchangeably, there is a subtle distinction between the two. Shadowing implies an asynchronous process in which updates to the remote storage unit can lag – or shadow – the production storage unit to some degree, usually a matter of a single action. A mirrored storage unit is a dual data entry – or synchronous process – in which the two storage units are exact duplicates – mirrors – of one another at all times. Hardware and Software Requirements for Shadowing
and Mirroring The other option, intelligent storage, is where the storage itself is responsible for keeping the two sites in a mirroring or shadowing mode. This relieves the process of requiring a second CPU and the cost associated with that requirement. The New Paradigm of Continuous Availability Operationally, as information is created at the production site, it is electronically vaulted to the recovery site. In the event of an outage, the recovery provider’s processor is immediately attached to the shadowed storage, the critical application activated, and the end-user network can fail-over. Another extension of the new recovery paradigm is in the area of heterogeneous storage access. As companies begin to share information between platforms on the same storage device, the ability to recover the information becomes centric to the organization’s recovery program. Information from an open system platform that is out of synchronization with information from other enterprise systems is of little use. With heterogeneous shadowing or mirroring, the recovery process becomes even more encompassing. The model can also be expanded to include work-load compression. With work-load compression, the entire tape backup operation is changed and integrated into the new storage paradigm. For example, by off-loading the backup process to the recovery provider, application availability becomes continuous at the production site while necessary backups are still performed. The final area to consider when designing a shadowing solution is the network requirements. Major enhancements to networking services have enabled shadowing and mirroring solutions. The biggest sizing area is matching the company’s transaction rate against the communication circuit required. In shadowing and mirroring operations only the "update" transaction is transmitted across the network. In a typical IS environment this accounts for 30-35% of the transaction rates. THE FUTURE IS NOW When thinking about implementing an electronic vaulting solution, remember it is a very flexible process. Companies can implement the solutions in phases: target mission critical applications and migrate their enterprise systems, and then target workload compression. The key is to identify the need, move to an information centric environment, and work with your storage provider and your recovery provider to integrate your storage, recovery and availability needs. About the Author |