Host based Replication Solution for Disaster Recovery

High Availability Replication Solution

High Availability Replication Solution

The pace and competitiveness of global commerce requires a flexible, resilient and available IT infrastructure that provides 24 x 7 x 365 access to applications and information. Any data, system or application downtime poses a threat to business operations and can have serious repercussions for your organization’s profitability, potentially impacting customers, reputation and revenue.

Achieving the new levels of high availability required to support mission-critical systems puts increased demands on IT and data center professionals.

The critical prevailing question that arises after a system disaster is, how quickly applications and data can be restored.

Many storage area networks (SANs) today can replicate data across distances between similar models of storage hardware and this can be an important part of any business continuity or disaster recovery strategy. Our solution is a software-based solution that also replicates data but at the host level, providing higher availability when systems are at the same location and disaster protection and recovery when they are not. Host-level file system replication occurs at the byte-level which is almost always more efficient than block-level SAN replication technologies and the application-aware monitoring and failover capabilities of this solution make it an excellent choice for critical applications such as Exchange and SQL Server. But what about organizations that have already made significant investments in SANs and SAN based replication? Are these solutions simply redundant? Do they provide no additional value or can they serve a complementary function?

A disaster can take many forms. Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and earthquakes first come to mind. But the destruction of computer hardware is the least likely cause of data loss. Less apparent disasters are statistically far more prevalent. The number one culprit in data loss is the failure of computer hardware components – power supplies, motherboards, disk drives, disk controllers, network interfaces, etc. You can’t perform accounting functions if the SQL Server-based system that hosts these applications fails, or email important reports if you loose an Exchange server

Hardware malfunctions and the second most common cause of failure, human error, cause over two-thirds of data loss. Even software corruption, theft and computer viruses are each two to four times as likely to cause data loss as the destruction of computer hardware. Only three percent of the time is hardware destruction the culprit. Whatever the cause, a disaster is anything that keeps an organization from meeting its objectives. An objective might be as simple getting the day’s work done, or it might be as tactical as providing a report to managers or as strategic as providing an analysis to the board of directors or the chief legal officer regarding a lawsuit. Sooner or later, smaller objectives lead to global objectives of generating revenue and making a profit. Perhaps a disaster is best defined as a condition where you don’t have the information to accomplish these objectives.

Regardless of whether you’re running critical business applications on Linux, Windows, UNIX or another mainstream operating system, every organization faces critical intervals when system downtime is unwelcome—whether it’s planned or unplanned.

Increasingly, shops that were able to accommodate modest periods of downtime for backups and system maintenance are finding increased server demands are closing backup windows. Globalization and expanding online business opportunities have been a big contributor to the unwelcomed contraction of periodic backup opportunities.

Since nearly all organizations need to keep their systems available for increasing amounts of time, they are now realizing that a system outage of even a few hours will result in disruption, chaos and wasted capital. For many companies, exposure to anything more than an hour or two of downtime has become unpalatable.

Benefits of this Replication Solution:

Simplicity – Deploy and configure the solution quickly using advanced features that automate the initial setup and the ongoing management of your availability environment.

Any-to-Any Protection - Ensure availability redundancy across physical, virtual, and cloud environments to provide a single-vendor solution in a complex data center.

Real-time Replication - Ensure the uninterrupted availability of critical application systems and virtually eliminate the potential for data loss.

Near-Zero Downtime During Migrations - Real-time replication technology allows users to remain active while the Availability Solution recreates the production environment on the new system.

Platform Independence - The Availability Solution allows you to protect more of your environment, while spending less than you would for other options.

Simplified Management - A unified console makes it easier to implement, manage and extract value from a powerful HA environment.

Advantages:

·         No requirement for Storage, since the tool can replicate from host to host

·         No need for similar type of storage on PR and DR, since this tool can replicate between heterogeneous storages

·         This tool is easy to install, use and administer.

·         Customer can implement it on a new server in about 10 minutes.

·         Not have to spend time monitoring the solution because it emails alerts if any issues arise.

·         No labor costs to manage the solution

·         Hardware independence and bandwidth efficient replication

·         Real-time protection and rapid workload recovery on any combination of physical, cloud or virtual servers.

·         Continuous replication enables near-instant recovery of business applications, files & data

·         Protects Exchange, SQL, IIS, SharePoint, File Server, Oracle, Blackberry, vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, Linux, UNIX etc.

·         Automated DR testing and/or push-button fail-over, fail-back

·         WAN optimized replication & jumpstart data seeding, for remote sites

·         Supports P2P, P2V, cross-hypervisor V2V & V2P

·         Supports DAS, SAN, NAS & cloud storage

·         Reduce costs by using public & private cloud

·         Reduce costs using virtual servers

·         Single solution for both physical & virtual servers

Platform Supported

■ UNIX: – IBM AIX 5.3 TL12, (32- and 64-bit) 6.1 TL7, 7.1 TL1(64-bit only)

 – Oracle Solaris 10, 11 SPARC(kernel level 144488 and later)/x86 (64-bit) (kernel level 144489 and later)

■ Linux – Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 through 6.2 (i386 and x86-64)

- Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 through 11 SP1 (i386 and x86-x64)

- CentOS version 4 through 6.2 (i386 and x86-x64)

	LOCAL & REMOTE USERS
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Summary

• The critical issue after a disaster is how quickly users can again work productively. Replicating data to other sites is one issue. More important is having programs and processes start, as well as Active Directory and DNS changes made, so that users can reach the targets just like before the disaster when the sources failed.

• For many, an automated failover process with minimal to no human intervention is needed to get users working again in a matter of minutes. For others, a more time intensive manual process may be acceptable.

• SAN array-based replication methods may be perfectly acceptable for synchronizing data to other locations.

• Our Availability Solution can automate the failover process of the operating system, network, and applications. These can be on non-SAN array (internal or directly attached) storage or even on separate SAN volumes not configured for SAN array based replication.

• Our Availability Solution can accommodate the differences in brand, processor, operating system and adapters that may occur with a replacement server or component. Both application and full system state protection and failover are available to achieve the diverse situations one may encounter.

• Our Availability Solution works equally well protecting physical and virtual workloads to any type of target. Even the virtualization technology can be different (e.g., a vSphere virtual machine to a Hyper-V virtual machine).

• Our Availability Solution can be used to initially move the data and even the operating system and application configurations from dissimilar storage to a new production environment.

 The above solution is based on "Double Take and Arcserv"