Is it time to visit the DR?
Like everything in the IT world, there always seems to be something else that needs to be done.
For a lot of clients and IT professionals, this causes a lot of ‘nice to have’ components to be pushed to the back burner. Much like your visit to the doctor or dentist, you look up and realize you should have gone, but time just got away from you.
One of the most important ‘nice to have’ items in the IT world, that gets shunted to the side, is disaster recovery. By definition, most business systems are considered to be critical systems. They are systems responsible for crucial operations such as corporate SEC reporting, budgeting and analysis. As such, they should have a disaster recovery plan. Beyond having a plan, there should be a plan that is tested, validated and reviewed yearly.
With the arrival of cloud technologies, and cloud vendors that have invested billions of dollars in state-of-the-art data centers, this conversation has become easier. But, not everyone is leveraging the cloud yet for software-as-a-service (SAAS) or platform-as-a-service (PAAS). Even if they are leveraging it, the steps to DR are not always clear or easily reproducible.
Here at iArch Solutions, we have helped numerous clients design, build and execute DR plans. We know what the headaches are for DR, and especially for DR in the Cloud space. For many years we’ve had the thought ‘there has to be an easier way’. Well, I’m pleased to announce that there actually is an easier way. Allow me to introduce Rackware.
RackWare is an industry leader in disaster recovery software (and migration software, but more on that in another blog). Using their software, you can setup DR environment (or single-server) migrations from on-premise data centers to other on-premise data centers, migrate them up to the Cloud (vendor agnostic) or between regions in the same Cloud. You can migrate them between disparate Cloud vendors if you want…really the possible combinations is open to your needs and/or imagination. RackWare is the first solution to truly offer a complete “Any to Any” Migration, Backup and Disaster Recovery solution. The great thing about the product is that once configured, it becomes a schedulable/repeatable activity, with very little ongoing maintenance. As such, it makes DR exercises less like that dreaded visit to the doctor and more like a simple checkbox that guarantees your business critical system is safe in any eventuality.
We are pleased to announce our partnership with RackWare, and moving forward, we will be sharing details about a webinar where we will demonstrate the software with a sample DR exercise. We were fortunate to get to demo this solution at KScope22 and spoke with a number of interested clients about the potentials of the solution. So stick around for the details, it’s one you will not want to miss.