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Planning for a Plan: Disaster Recovery Preparation. Alex Schenck Solutions Engineer, Zerto. Alex Schenck. AS/BS InfoTech, NEIT MS Management, WPI IT professional since 2006 IT Manager, SysAdmin , Tech Support, Sales Engineer VCP5/VCP6 Lives in Cumberland RI with Melissa.
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Planning for a Plan:Disaster Recovery Preparation Alex Schenck Solutions Engineer, Zerto
Alex Schenck • AS/BS InfoTech, NEIT • MS Management, WPI • IT professional since 2006 • IT Manager, SysAdmin, Tech Support, Sales Engineer • VCP5/VCP6 • Lives in Cumberland RI with Melissa
How do you handle… • …power failures? • …hardware failures? • …network failures? • …software/application failures? • …PEBKAC? • …the “smoking hole scenario?” • …the unknown?
If your answer is… • Restore from backups… • Restore from storage snapshot… • Restore from VM snapshot… • Hope and pray
Knowledge is power • Cost of data loss (Recovery Point Objective More = $$$) • Cost of downtime (Recovery Time Objective More = $$$) 00:00 06:00 09:00 12:00 15:00 18:00 $$$$$$$$$
Start from Scratch • Technology is a means to an end • Does it provide value to the organization? • Does the cost of implementing the solution outweigh the cost of a disaster? • Where is your organization’s assets? • Single site • Colocation • CSP/MSP • Public cloud
Things to consider: • What is the problem/deficiency? • What is the desired impact of the new solution? • Total Cost of Ownership • Agility/Cloud Philosophy
Know Thyself • Consider your workloads • Determine tiers – not all data is created or treated equal • Determine the “cutoff point” for backup versus disaster recovery • Stuff you can’t live without versus stuff you can • What can the business afford?
So what do you pick? • Synchronous replication (RPO 0 / RTO 0) • Asynchronous replication (RPO very low / RTO very low) • Storage snapshots • Backup • Archive
A note on why BC/DR • Backups – The moment that a point in time backup is created, its value diminishes with time • Solves a different use case
RPO and RTO • Recovery Point Objective: Total amount of data you will lose between the latest iteration of “now” and selected recovery checkpoint • BC/DR: Seconds (Zerto!), minutes • Storage Snapshots: Hours • Backups: Days • Recovery Time Objective: Total amount of time it takes to provide service back to stakeholders • Varys with solution (Zerto = minutes!) (image from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141027141721-157452529-what-s-your-rto-rpo-for-disaster-recovery)
Tiering • Tier 1: Highest priority, highest impact • Represent the greatest impact to revenue, reputation, and health of your organization should it become unavailable • Tier 2: Important, crucical, perhaps not as important • Tier 3: Secondary or supporting in nature to Tier 1 or Tier 2 • Ancillary servers
Service Level Agreements for Tiers • How far back in the past should I be able to provide BC/DR functionality for a given workload? • What is the highest RPO between checkpoints that the organization will tolerate? • What is the longest time interval that a given workload may go without being tested for failover functionality?
Putting the Pieces in Place • How much of your environment do you want to be able to fail over at once? • Complete site recovery, or partial recoverability only? • What budget and staffing do you have available to support a DR environment? • Cloud friendliness, or on-prem only? • “Thick provisioned DR” • “Thin provisioned DR” • Elasticity into the cloud