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General Information
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June 19, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 17
Page(s) 9 in print issue
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Preparing Your Data For The Worst
Hosting & Disaster Recovery Strategies Continue To Evolve With Technology
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| Key Points
• SMEs with between 100 and 250 users tend to be the largest users of hosting services, as they tend to lack a well-established internal IT infrastructure.
• Hosted services can reduce the costs of disaster recovery while increasing recovery times significantly. Alternatively, open-source storage tools are gaining ground among SMEs.
• Service-level agreements are probably the most important single aspect of the negotiation process for hosted storage services. Therefore, small to midsized enterprises should scrutinize SLAs carefully before accepting them. | | So much change has occurred in the disaster recovery, or DR, landscape that some time-honored best practices have either become outmoded or need adjustment to stay relevant. Sending tape offsite by UPS truck, for example, has resulted in so many headlines due to data breaches that it seems this strategy is no longer as ironbound as it once was. As a result, hosting has blossomed in the small to midsized enterprise space in recent times as a way to supplement more traditional approaches to DR.
“SME adoption of hosted services has grown from 21% in 2006 to 41% in 2008,” says Avinash Arun, senior associate with analyst firm AMI-Partners.
According to Arun, there are several reasons for this surge. As IT sophistication has increased, small and midsized enterprises are incorporating more of it into their core operations. However, they often don’t have the resources to be able to deploy and maintain more technology in-house. By hosting DR-related resources, they relieve themselves from the hassles of implementation and upgrades while gaining competent around-the-clock support. The end result is lower downtime.
 Lower Up-front Costs
Building a fully redundant SAN, adding replication between disk arrays, configuring a tape backup infrastructure, implementing de-duplication, and using other tools that aid in disaster recovery can be a challenge for those lacking a large IT budget. Hosting eliminates the hefty up-front investment by deferring costs onto a pay-per-use or monthly subscription model.
 Further, implementation can be staggered over time or ramped up or down as needed or as the funds become available to support it.
“Hosting allows SMEs to deploy hosted services for a few seats to begin with and then expand, if required,” says Arun. “This service model enables flexible commitment to on-demand services.”
The capital costs can be colossal, for example, if you are establishing an offsite disaster recovery site that contains the same basic storage, server, and application footprint as the primary data center; thus, relying on someone else for that functionality can be attractive.
“SMEs prefer hosted services because there is less downtime [and] more reliability and automatic upgrades are taken care of by the hosting provider,” says Arun. “Hosted services and applications should be a major part of any business’ DR strategy.”
Decentralize For DR Protection
It used to be the case that disaster recovery was only about having the data available via a restore from tape in order to get the business up and running again. Nowadays, with so many people working virtually, it is far more important to have IT systems available regardless of where that business is being conducted.
“By putting the people in a different place from the services, the office slowly becomes a networking point for the people but not for the backbone of the business,” says Craig Collins, president of Concentric (www.concentric.com). “If there’s a major event like the destruction of a building, the business can continue to run virtually.”
In his opinion, hosted services are an economical way for all but the largest enterprises to achieve geographic redundancy. By decentralizing IT in this way and making it so that the company doesn’t have to invest so much in its own infrastructure, it becomes more impervious to freak weather events, fires, and other potential disasters.
“Hosted services provide a perfect way to do geographically redundant backups,” says Collins.
Open-Source Storage As An Alternative To Hosting
Although many firms favor hosting, another way to cut storage costs is to implement open-source software.
“Storage is the easiest way to get into using open-source software,” says Jason Williams, COO and CTO of DigiTar (www.digitar.com). “Our entire operation is based on open source, and the financial perspective is the biggest reason.”
He prefers iSCSI over Fibre Channel because it enables him to use x86 gear running cheaper and higher-capacity SATA drives compared to high-end disk arrays. Further, he advocates SATA over SAS, despite the latter’s far higher revolutions per minute, because you get more for your money. For example, Williams cites a 15,000rpm 146GB SAS drive from a certain vendor that costs $180 and a 7,200rpm 250GB SATA disk from the same vendor that costs $55, meaning you can buy 3.2 SATA drives for every SAS drive. Those three disks provide a combined I/Ops of 240 compared to 175 for the SAS. His point is that higher revolutions per minute don’t necessarily translate into higher performance.
Williams also points to the numbers he crunched for using proprietary hardware from the big storage vendors vs. buying x86 boxes. One array, for instance, was priced at $150,000 compared to $35,000 for an x86 box that offered more processing power and more storage. 
by Drew Robb
Best Tip: Scrutinize Service-Level Agreements
Hosting means handing over the delivery of a specific service to an external provider, and in the case of hosted storage services, which involve the care and keeping of sensitive data, it is vital to make sure you know how your data will be handled. Therefore, SLAs (service-level agreements) are probably the single most important element in any negotiations concerning hosted disaster recovery services.
Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer at Rackspace (www.rackspace.com), points out that not all SLAs are created equal. He encourages organizations—especially those looking to host for the first time—to carefully scrutinize SLAs from hosting providers.
“SLAs are an insurance policy for your business, and the hosting company should make it easy for you to understand its SLA,” says Moorman. “Your hosting provider should be putting their money where their mouth is in the event you might experience any issues, such as downtime.” |
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