2011 Prediction: Vision Solutions
The Future for Disaster Recovery is in the Mix
When thinking about the future for virtualisation, I’m struck by how quickly it has gone from a niche technology with a huge amount of potential in the world of x86 servers to being a dominant platform for deploying new workloads quickly and efficiently. The rise of server virtualisation has also made business continuity more affordable: instead of one-to-one server approaches to high availability, new models such as many-to-one and virtual server protection have been developed. The impact of this has been to make business continuity more affordable.
However, virtualisation has also had an impact on how organisations approach disaster recovery. While the drop in prices around disc technologies and the cost efficiency of virtualisation together have made DR projects more affordable, this has also led to potentially more complexity around how to protect data.
A lot of this is due to perception, as virtualisationis not a magic bullet. Weaknesses in businesses’ disaster recovery plans have not been effectively addressed by virtualisationby itself, and in some cases have led to gaps in recovery processes. From our own research, businesses are reporting that plans have not been completely or recently tested, and in fact, may not fulfill what they were designed to achieve should they be invoked. Lack of coordination of disaster recovery plans between IT and other business units was also identified as a key weakness which companies are looking to put right in 2011.
More than One Platform to Protect?
For 2011, the management headache is not going to go away. Virtualisation has added another layer within IT networks that has to be considered when implementing a DR strategy. Secondly, the virtual machines that organisations are running are now hosting business-critical applications, so they need to be protected.
As the workloads within virtual machines become more critical, ownership of the business continuity strategy will be an important decision to make. Who should hold this responsibility? Should it be the team that supports the platform, or should a business continuity plan that covers the whole organisation be considered?
Well, even though server virtualisation has been fantastically successful, it is very rare that 100 per cent of a company’s IT will be virtualised, so there will now be multiple platforms in place that will all require degrees of protection. Mainframe and other server architectures apart from x86-based machines still have a role to play.
At the same time, I am seeing organisations take up multiple hypervisors as well. This can be due to a whole host of reasons - cost to acquire licenses, application support, internal skills or company politics have all influenced decisions around implementations. Merger and acquisition can also bring different systems together.
What this adds up to is a lot of complexity when it comes to operations, and this can make the job of protecting applications difficult. I would argue for one business continuity strategy that encompasses all the different platforms that a company may have to ensure that critical data is protected across all their physical and virtual machines, irrespective of the underlying platform. The alternative is using different tools for each platform, which brings in more potential gaps for lost data.
I foresee more convergence of physical and virtual DR solutions, where single tools will be used to support different platforms. This will support the single continuity plan approach, but should also be easier and cheaper to manage than using individual DR products for each physical and virtual platform.
