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Exploiting the Cloud for Business Continuity — Mel BeckmanBusiness continuity is more than just the ability to restart a business after a disaster; it also ensures that your applications continue operating through natural and man-made catastrophes. The cloud, of course, brings new options to AIX, IBM i, and Linux IBM Power users.

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By Mel Beckman

Cloud resources lower BC costs while delivering geographic diversity

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Disasters happen, and prepared businesses survive them. But simple survival is no longer

enough in today’s highly competi-tive business climate. With traditional disaster recovery (DR) thinking, a disaster occurs, the business relocates to another location with adequate compute resources, restores its appli-cations and data from backup, and goes to work in “recovery” mode. That approach worked in the batch process-ing era, but it doesn’t work so well with modern IT systems composed of interwoven server and database complexes. Today’s IT data centers weren’t built in a day, and they can’t be rebuilt that quickly, either.

To accommodate contemporary IT resilience needs, the industry devised the concept of business continuity (BC). BC designs systems to be robust in normal operation, with the ability

By Mel Beckman

Cloud resources lower BC costs while delivering geographic diversity

for Business Continuity

Exploiting theCover Story

CloudDisasters happen, and prepared

businesses survive them. But simple survival is no longer

enough in today’s highly competitive business climate. In traditional disas-ter recovery (DR) thinking, after a disaster occurs, a business relocates to another location with adequate com-pute resources, restores its applications and data from backup, and goes to work in “recovery” mode. That approach worked in the batch processing era, but it doesn’t work so well with modern IT systems composed of interwoven server and database complexes. Today’s IT data centers weren’t built in a day, and they can’t be rebuilt that quickly, either.

To accommodate contemporary IT resilience needs, the industry devised the concept of business continu-ity (BC). Systems designed with BC in mind are robust in normal opera-tion and have the ability to switch to

Cover Story

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backup compute and storage resources on short notice in response to disasters ranging from a server crash to a tsunami. BC aims to keep businesses functioning as close to normally as possible during a disaster, rather than running in post-disaster recovery mode.

Initially, BC plans relied on either standby “hot sites” or parallel, full-time data centers to replicate core business processes such as email, voice communications, and essential applications. This form of BC essentially doubles IT expenses, making it available to only the most well-heeled enterprises. The advent of elastic, pay-as-you-go, cloud-based IT infrastructure dramatically lowered BC implementa-tion costs, bringing new options to the table.

Cloud computing offers several services that can both aid tradi-tional DR processes and dramatically lower the cost of meaningful BC, giving you new options that you should evaluate today and begin integrating into your BC plan as soon as possible. To select appropri-ate BC measures, you first need to gain fluency in some BC termi-nology. You’ll then be able to review the available cloud resources and determine if cloud capabilities can transition your organization from DR to BC while potentially lowering total IT expenditures.

The Language of BCBC planning has a formal methodology behind it. Disaster mitigation experts have established two key metrics you must determine for your organization before you can implement effective BC processes: the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

The RTO is the maximum elapsed time you consider acceptable between a disaster and recovery of critical business application func-tionality. This might vary among applications; for example, the RTO for order processing might be an interval of mere hours, whereas the RTO for payroll could be measured in days.

The RPO defines the point in time to which you’ll restore a given application once you’ve restarted operations from your backup data sources. RPO effectively defines the maximum age of the data you

Mel Beckman

is senior technical editor for POWER IT Pro.

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can tolerate and still resume viable operations. If your offsite back-ups can be up to a week old, you’ve implicitly accepted an RPO of seven days. (Your BC plan will have to include some means for catching up any missing data, which might entail re-entering trans-actions from paper records or re-executing transactions from a data-base transaction log.)

These two metrics already exist in your organization, even if you don’t know what they are. To move forward with cloud-based BC, you must know—or better yet, consciously define—these metrics in light of your operational requirements. The technology exists to meet RTO and RPO times of less than one second. Obviously, management would be delighted for you to report such a vaunted achievement—at least until you presented the bill. Realistically, though, few enter-prises can approach, yet alone realize, zero RTO/RPO.

That’s where cloud IT infrastructure comes in. Because you pay for cloud resources only when you use them, you can shift much of the recurring expense of a traditional hot-site BC approach to when you actually need the resources. You’ll still spend money planning and implementing cloud failover mechanisms, but you’ll mitigate the high price of ongoing readiness.

Head in the CloudsPerhaps the simplest use of cloud resources is as a safe, offsite data repository. Cloud storage is reliable and cheap: It’s typically less than $100/month per terabyte, and prices are steadily declining. To aug-ment legacy tape backups (where tapes must be physically relocated to a secure site on a daily basis), implement disk-to-disk backup locally, then mirror the disk backup over the Internet to cloud stor-age. Mirroring only needs to copy the data that has changed, and it can be performed at regular intervals (e.g., daily) or continuously. You can usually specify a geographic region for your cloud repository that enhances disaster resilience; for example, an earthquake-prone West Coast company can choose an East Coast region for storage,

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whereas a hurricane-endangered East Coast business might prefer a land-locked central U.S. region. Offshore storage is available at slightly higher costs.

The advantages of disk-to-disk backups are well-established and in use for tape already. Disk-to-disk backups are faster to perform, require no human intervention, and permit faster recovery in non-disaster situations, such as when an application must be reset to a previ-ous state. The vast majority of incidents requiring backup data aren’t true disasters but are temporary urgencies, and disk-to-disk backup is both cost-effective and timely for that purpose. The disk-to-disk pro-cess lets you streamline tape handling, shifting it to normal daylight hours, and consolidate backups to reduce media requirements.

But the cloud adds the advantage of geographically diverse stor-age that you can restore rapidly into a cloud-based server infrastruc-ture (as described in the next section) without the need to physically transport tapes to a recovery site or worry about compatible reader devices. The cloud copy process can occur automatically (without incurring overtime labor), during late-night periods when Internet bandwidth is typically most available.

Two aspects of cloud backup require some thought, however. First, given today’s Internet bandwidth costs, small- and medium-sized businesses typically have only a few megabits per second of avail-able outgoing Internet throughput, even at night. Larger organiza-tions might have 100Mbps, but they will have correspondingly higher data quantity needs. Both types of businesses face the same problem: Making an initial full backup of all mission-critical data to the cloud is likely impractical, because by the time the backup finished after several days, it would be too outdated to be useful.

The second cloud backup aspect that requires careful thought is the process of recovering your data from the cloud. Recovery is the inverse of the backup requirement, only now you have the pres-sures of a disaster complicating your decision. You could reverse the procedure you used to upload data, bringing recovery media to your

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cloud provider to download the backup at high speed, which entails a modest service charge. Depending on the timeliness of your backup mirroring process, the RPO can be encouragingly short—as brief as a few minutes or hours. The time to execute the backup download, however, must be factored into your RTO. It’s difficult to envision this being less than a day. But there’s an alternative way to use your cloud-ensconced backups: resuming operation in the cloud itself.

Mighty CloudsOne oft-unappreciated aspect of cloud IT infrastructure is that it relies heavily on virtualization (i.e., simulating computers and OSs on generic hardware running within a hardened data center). The inherent cost savings of virtualization is what makes cloud comput-ing possible in the first place. Virtualization also presents a low-cost alternative to hot-site DR.

Cloud infrastructure services go far beyond storage—they deliver utility compute and networking services a la carte as well. You pay for compute and network services only as you use them, because cloud-provider economies of scale let you ensure that those resources, in the form of virtual machines (VMs) and Internet transport, can be purchased on the spot. Moreover, it’s common for cloud providers to let you attach VMs dynamically to cloud storage, which means you can “spin up” a pre-configured cloud VM and connect it to your backup repository in seconds. You’ve now completely eliminated the backup download time requirement, letting you achieve an RPO com-mensurate with your RTO (minutes or hours, rather than days).

The easiest way to partake of this cloud option is to employ vir-tualization yourself, running your application workloads in VMs compatible with the VM capabilities of your cloud provider. You sim-ply include VM images, commonly called Virtual Disks (VDKs), in your cloud backup process, then reboot those images into a cloud VM instead of your local virtual infrastructure, effectively reconstituting your IT environment “in the sky.”