Want your DR to do more? Now with IBM, VMware and SureSkills, it can
For many organisations, that moment when disaster strikes and there is a need to invoke the disaster recovery (DR) plan or start restoring from backup is fraught with tension. There are good reasons for that. Surveys show a large number of organisations still don’t test their DR plans frequently enough to trust that they will work when needed.
Building an effective DR plan has always been a challenge: IT teams have to prove the system is reliable, that it will protect their critical applications and deliver services back to the business in a granular fashion. And all while managing the cost.
Business’s look for guarantees. They’re more reliant on IT than it has ever been, and any moment of downtime counts as a major setback. These pressures need more than just basic DR systems that either replicate offline copies or store backups in the cloud.
Organisations can get frustrated because traditional backup methodologies can prove ineffective in the event of a DR invocation. So, how do we get to the point where we get something better than that? In other words, a more enterprise-focused view of the environment?
IBM and VMware’s global strategic partnership makes these enterprise-class features possible. Their respective reach and technical heritage gives customers confidence in their DR systems for much more than just backup and restore capability – from two technology industry heavyweights.
In a blog post announcing the partnership, IBM and VMware said it would give customers flexibility and transparency when moving workloads into the public cloud. “With an extremely straightforward and simple approach, users can easily move and implement enterprise applications and disaster recovery solutions across a global network of cloud data centres.
Enterprises already familiar with VMware can extend existing on-premises VMware infrastructure into IBM Cloud with simplified, monthly pricing. This makes transitioning into a hybrid model faster and easier because no changes are needed to the underlying workloads and enterprises can directly leverage existing skills and tooling.”
As an enterprise partner of both VMware and of IBM, we at SureSkills Consulting and Solutions believe this partnership is excellent news for our customers. We now actively encourage them to run real workloads on their DR estate as part of the contingency planning along with. It’s simpler to validate the site’s availability and it ensures everything is functional for that moment when it might be called into service. What’s more, it’s easier to manage the estate as and when it becomes live. Our customers no longer have that creeping sense of dread when they invoke their DR, because they know it will work. With active integration, it looks like a site on the network.
Now, live workloads, granular invocation and active integration into cloud are all possible on IBM’s Bluemix Bare Metal servers. Basic DR can’t deliver this level of functionality. A standard DR solution that involves replicating virtual machines will not provide that type of granular replication. Instead, organisations can replicate their live virtual machine, and it’s there if and when it’s needed.
As for the cost argument, it’s true that it used to be far too expensive to consider an active/active data centre model for backup and DR. Cloud economics changes that completely. You are no longer paying for a data centre, but for a slice of capability – even though it looks like a data centre from your perspective. Scaling happens only at the point when it’s needed, not before, so there’s minimal upfront cost.
SureSkills can deliver technical design workshops and proof-of-concept demos to validate a solution’s effectiveness, and we can provide references on request of other public and private sector customers that avail of this service. If you would like to book a workshop or a consultation, please contact us at info@sureskills.com.
