Today’s backups are about more than just having a cold backup off site somewhere. It’s about full business continuity – being able to run when your primary site is degraded, individual systems are down or the entire site is unavailable. I think there are two primary ways that people do it – one is to check a box and another is for it to actually work.
There are a few different ways to tackle business continuity from the simple to the quite complex. I’ve done both; full datacenter redundancy as well as “just” a cold backup for specific systems.
Business Continuity Overview
I’ve worked with remote sites, failover, active / active and hot / hot systems, multi-site redundancy of networks, storage, compute, extranets and ingress / egress traffic. I’ve also done work on the people side – having a warm office space in a different locale, multiple offices and redundancy within a single office. At the end of the day, I believe that there should be any app, anywhere, anytime (assuming it meets security policy).
Business Continuity Experience
- Array based replication
- VMware SRM
- Non-Array based replication (eg, Replication Appliance)
- Redundant extranet circuits using either BGP or some form of dynamic routing
- Multiple Internet Egress / Ingress (ARIN)
- Like for like firewalls (Panorama)
- Veeam Backup and Recovery
- Zerto
- DNS Dynamic Traffic Control (DTC)
- F5 GLB
- Symantec Backup Exec
- Rubrik
- Commvault
- Tape Libraries / Tapes (Quantum, Dell)
- Customer Communication around BC Plans
- Strategy and Policies
- Multiple Offices (Hot / Warm, Hot / Cold, Hot / Hot)