Meeting the challenge of the Always-on Business

Westcon Imagine 2014 - As consumers, we expect zero downtime from apps and websites. Why should it be any different for your business?

After all, in today’s interconnected and global business environment we’ve left behind the perimeters of the nine-to-five working day, and continued access to information and applications 24/7 is a critical driver of business success.

We are, says Charles Clarke, Technical Director for APAC at Veeam, ‘in the era of the Always-On Business’ where customers, partners, suppliers and employees expect access to information and applications at any time, from any device and with no tolerance for downtime or data loss.

According to Veeam’s annual Data Protection Report 2013, the average cost per hour of downtime is more than US$300,000, factoring in loss of productivity, labour to fix the problem and loss of revenue and reputation. With the average outage lasting around five hours, it’s easy to see why organisations need to be able to recover data almost instantly, to avoid that potential US$1.5 million pitfall.

The challenge, Clarke says, comes in predicting and avoiding outages where possible, and minimising the impact when it does occur.

He says while it has always been possible to have high availability, it was often cost-prohibitive and complex. The modern data center, built on virtualisation and the cloud, helps bridge the gap, but data protection toolsets are often designed with the old paradigm in mind.

“At Veeam, we have seen organisations regularly struggle with legacy tools and as a result not get the best return on investment from newer parts of their infrastructure. This leaves a clear gap between the goal of always-on availability and the cost and complexity of solutions – such as standalone servers – retrofitted to try and match the dynamism of the modern data center,” he says.

“Businesses can start to meet the challenge of ‘always-on’ by implementing multi-tiered data recovery. Organisations should apply the gold 3-2-1 rule to keep valuable data intact. For comprehensive data protection, have 3 copies of data with one in production, on 2 different media and 1 stored offsite.

“Veeam makes provision for onsite data recovery that can also be streamed to a cloud provider, ensuring offsite archivescan be retrieved.”

Clarke says Veeam’s range of patented recovery methods reduce downtime for virtual workloads to minutes, representing a ‘massive’ saving in time to recovery and minimising the outage.

“Customers regularly report recovery point and time objectives of less than 15 minutes.”

“However, the best outage is the one which never occurs and Veeam tools provide predictive analysis so unnecessary downtime can be sidestepped.”

And having backup without regularly tested recovery is a waste of time and resources, he adds.

“Having a plan will not suffice, it has to be completed with routine recovery testing that ensures all operations are functioning the way they should. Veeam has patented technology that allows for automated recovery testing of every backup, every time, ensuring backups are recoverable.

“This eliminates the time taken for unsuccessful recoveries.”

Veeam Availability Suite 

Keeping your business up and running at all times is critical.

Businesses today require 24/7 access to data, efficient management of exploding data growth and little tolerance for downtime.

Veeam Availability Suite enables the Always-On Business by providing solutions that deliver availability for the Modern Data Center, built on virtualisation and the cloud.

Among the key features are:

• High-speed recovery: Providing rapid recovery of what you want, the way you want it
• Data loss avoidance: Near-continuous data protection and streamlined disaster recovery
• Verified protection: Guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server, every time
• Risk mitigation: Low-risk deployment with a production-like test environment
• Complete visibility: Proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before operational impact