Topic: Disaster Recovery

In a perfect world, recovering a company's data and getting it back into production after a major disaster would be fast and automatic. Got some news for you: Even “good enough” is rare in this world, never mind “perfect.”

First of all, industry analysts from Gartner and IDC say that 30 to 40 percent of all IT shops either have no disaster recovery system in place or do not know how to use it correctly. Second, even if a shop does have a DR apparatus in place and tests it occasionally, there are plenty of examples of such systems not performing according to plan.

Today, the cloud stirs up all manner of possibilities for handling data protection, but the cloud also brings many challenges: security, bandwidth, connection availability and data recovery.

Perhaps in response to these issues, innovators in this space are blending the capabilities of traditional onsite backup systems with cloud storage, so that the best of both worlds is available to users—an onsite component captures and restores data at high speed, while older data is moved to the cloud. Hybrid cloud backup, or disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C), is turning the cloud into an accessible and useful component of the data protection infrastructure today.

Disaster Recovery is just as important for file services (NAS) as it is for structured data (databases), but it’s often neglected. Like backups, if you don’t have a loss situation, you can get by with a poor NAS DR strategy, and may not know it’s inadequate. But the DR options available aren’t always the most effective, or cost-effective. Cloud-based file services can offer some attractive benefits and features, but the recovery can still be a problem as the time or cost to replace a failed NAS system may be unacceptable. Cloud-based NAS systems that run as a virtual machine offer an alternative solution  providing affordable NAS DR in a few minutes.

This is one test drive you have to see to believe. One of the proposed benefits of cloud storage is its ability to return a company to operations when disaster strikes. We put that idea to the test in our latest test drive for the Nasuni Filer. As the video will show the results were amazing. We destroyed our Filer and were back up and running in 10 minutes.

Perhaps lost somewhat in all of the VMworld buzz this week was Nasuni's announcement that it is offering a free cloud gateway to companies in regions vulnerable to hurricanes.  It’s not free forever – you get three months of gateway service free if you sign up between now and November  30th.  Users still need to pay the cloud storage service provider for capacity consumed.

This offer really highlights the potential cloud storage has to help companies or local governments get fast and easy access to disaster recovery capabilities they could never afford in the past.  No hardware to buy, just download the software, map the drives and start a copy process.  Robocopy is free and you already have it, so no investment there.  And I’ve used the Nasuni software – I am certainly no system administrator but I was able to figure out how to add files and create snapshot copies, as well as restore from snaps, pretty quickly.  And because the environment is virtual – getting up and running in the event of an actual disaster can be done by spinning up a virtual machine from anywhere, provided you have the proper credentials.