While you may feel 100% confident in your BC/DR preparedness today, have you considered what kind of upheaval any of the following changes would result in?
- Moving your DR site to the cloud
- Switching out or adding a new all-flash array (AFA) from a different manufacturer
- Introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) clusters into the environment
Whether driven by executive order or your own desire to modernize, any of these decisions have far reaching ramifications.
Experience teaches us that data replication and site failover techniques limited to a specific storage array, public cloud, or hyperconverged system results in two undesirable consequences:
- Subjects you to a costly overhaul of your BC/DR procedures each time you change any of these variables. And the extent of the overhaul is far worse than anyone would have anticipated.
- The mere thought of having to implement, test and audit such changes may be preventing you from considering competing alternatives offering superior solutions. Instead, you settle for more of the same.
Neither outcome benefits the business.
At the heart of the problem is the lack of standardization even within the same storage manufacturer for replicating data, taking snapshots and recovering from failures. That both limits your choices and drives up your costs. An expensive AFA at the primary site requires an equally expensive like-model at the DR site, despite having a much reduced role.
DataCore lets you approach the challenge in a novel way by implementing BC/DR capabilities in a control plane that operates across different types of storage manufacturers, topologies and locations.
Rather than confine data recovery and high availability methods to the characteristics of the current environment with its RPO/RTO requirements, you can assimilate changes sure to come in the near future. And do so without taking on a major overhaul of your BC/DR practices.
The secret sauce providing this level of flexibility comes in a layer of software-defined storage (SDS) services that operate between your applications and your storage.
DataCore offers real-time synchronous data replication and asynchronous replication across sites regardless of the type of storage at each location. Cross-site failover and failback are similarly orchestrated for hyperconverged deployments and 3-tier SANs alike. Snapshot, CDP and backup /restore methods adapt accordingly.
Knowing that SANs will continue to evolve, new storage manufacturers will regularly appear, public clouds will prove more inviting, requires you to approach BC/DR planning in a more enlightened way. What if your executives asked you right now if your environment is ready to adopt any of these new technologies? Can you confidently answer “yes” today?
Think about it, companies are constantly searching to increase storage performance, keep data available longer and reduce storage costs. Your company is no different and will eventually come knocking for answers. Investing in software-defined storage will guarantee you are ready for any of these future demands.
It is time to start aligning yourself with a new vision and position yourself ahead of the curve. All the facts and trends point to software-defined storage becoming the cornerstone of every datacenter. It’s totally up to you if you want to embrace the inevitable shift to software-driven intelligence or find yourself without a proper answer when your boss says, “hey, can we replicate to the cloud?” The choice is yours!
One easy way to share what we’ve covered above with your less technical colleagues, is to have them watch this 2-minute video on Hidden BC/DR dependencies. Then together, you can reevaluate your current Business Continuity plan / Disaster Recovery strategy and determine how to make it even stronger with DataCore’s software-defined storage solution.
For more in-depth tips on how to standardize your storage-related BC/DR practices, see the solution brief:
Preserve proven Business Continuity practices despite inevitable changes in your data storage infrastructure
