Real-time recovery
Encyclopedia
Real-time recovery is the ability to recover a server from an infrastructure failure or human-induced error in a time frame that has minimal impact on business operations. Real-time recovery focuses on the most appropriate technology for restores, thus reducing the Recovery Time Objective
(RTO) to minutes, Recovery Point Objective
s (RPO0 to within 15 minutes ago, and minimizing Test Recovery Objectives (TRO), which is the ability to test and validate backups have occurred correctly without impacting production systems.
Real-Time Recovery is a new market segment in the backup
, recovery
and disaster recovery
market that addresses the challenges companies that have historically faced with regards to protecting, and more importantly, recovering their data.
1) Server Hardware Failure - Preventing a server failure is very difficult, but it is possible to take precautions to avoid total server failure through the user of Redundant Power Supplies, RAID disk sets.
2) Human Error - These disasters are major reasons for failure. Human error and intervention may be intentional or unintentional which can cause massive failures such as loss of entire systems or data files. This category of data loss includes accidental erasure, walkout, sabotage, burglary, virus, intrusion, etc.
3) Natural Disasters / Acts of terrorism – although infrequent, companies should weigh up their risk to natural disasters or acts of terrorism. How much data loss is the business willing or able tolerate.
for various business processes (such as the process to run payroll, generate an order, e-mail, etc.). The metrics specified for the business processes must then be mapped to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes.
Once the recovery time objective and recovery point objective metrics have been mapped to IT infrastructure, the DR planner can determine the most suitable recovery strategy for each system. An important note here however is that the business ultimately sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget. While most business unit heads would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection historically have made high availability solutions impractical and unaffordable. The benefit of implementing a Real-Time Recovery solution is that the investment is substantially reduced from traditional tape based backup products.
Recovery Time Objective
The recovery time objective is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity....
(RTO) to minutes, Recovery Point Objective
Recovery point objective
-Recovery point objective :When computers used for normal "production" business services are affected by a "Major Incident" that cannot be fixed quickly, then the Information Technology Service Continuity Plan is performed, by the ITSC recovery team...
s (RPO0 to within 15 minutes ago, and minimizing Test Recovery Objectives (TRO), which is the ability to test and validate backups have occurred correctly without impacting production systems.
Real-Time Recovery is a new market segment in the backup
Backup
In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup....
, recovery
Data recovery
Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives , USB flash drive,...
and disaster recovery
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity...
market that addresses the challenges companies that have historically faced with regards to protecting, and more importantly, recovering their data.
Definition of Real-Time Recovery
A Real-time recovery solution must contain (at a minimum) the following attributes: The ability to restore a Windows server in minutes to the same, totally different or to a virtual environment to within 15 minutes ago and not require the use of any additional agents, options or modules to accomplish this. It must be able to restore files in seconds (after all, the only reason anyone backups is to be able to restore). It must perform sector level backups, every 15 minutes and have the ability to self-heal a broken incremental chain of backups should part of the image set get corrupted or deleted . It must deliver improved recoverability of data files and databases.Classification of Data Loss
Data Loss can be classified in three broad categories.1) Server Hardware Failure - Preventing a server failure is very difficult, but it is possible to take precautions to avoid total server failure through the user of Redundant Power Supplies, RAID disk sets.
2) Human Error - These disasters are major reasons for failure. Human error and intervention may be intentional or unintentional which can cause massive failures such as loss of entire systems or data files. This category of data loss includes accidental erasure, walkout, sabotage, burglary, virus, intrusion, etc.
3) Natural Disasters / Acts of terrorism – although infrequent, companies should weigh up their risk to natural disasters or acts of terrorism. How much data loss is the business willing or able tolerate.
Platforms for Data Servers
Data Servers can be either physical hosts or can be servers running as guest servers within a virtualization platform or a combination of both. It is very common for a customer environment to have a mixture of Virtual and Physical Servers. This is where attention to detail must be given to the approach of protecting the data on these servers at regular intervals. There are distinct advantages in selecting a technology that is virtual or physical independent. This would limit the number of technologies that organizations will have to get trained on, skilled up on, purchase, deploy, manage and maintain. In an ideal world, if you can reduce the complexity of managing multiple products to protect your physical and virtual infrastructure you will reap the rewards. A technology that gets installed at the operating system level ensures consistency in an environment that is either physical or virtual and eliminates API compatibility or Disk Volume Structure limitations (e.g. Raw Mapped Devices, VMFS).Strategies
Prior to selecting a realtime recovery strategy or a Real-Time Recovery (RTR) solution, a disaster recovery planner should refer to their organization's business continuity plan which should indicate the key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective Recovery time objectiveRecovery Time Objective
The recovery time objective is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity....
for various business processes (such as the process to run payroll, generate an order, e-mail, etc.). The metrics specified for the business processes must then be mapped to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes.
Once the recovery time objective and recovery point objective metrics have been mapped to IT infrastructure, the DR planner can determine the most suitable recovery strategy for each system. An important note here however is that the business ultimately sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget. While most business unit heads would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection historically have made high availability solutions impractical and unaffordable. The benefit of implementing a Real-Time Recovery solution is that the investment is substantially reduced from traditional tape based backup products.