The Big Plan: Business Continuity

For my employer, this is the year of disaster recovery.  Almost all of our major projects tie-in to the goal of performing a successful DR test by the end of the year.  Besides the standard IT things that have to get done on a regular basis (asset management, corporate application TLC, etc.), this goal is really driving the work we’re doing.

Sometime before I was hired, the company purchased two EMC Celerra NS352s for NAS/IP storage and two EMC Centeras for file and email archiving.  We’re an HP shop so were using DL380 G5s with the little USB key inside running ESX 3i or ESXi or whatever it’s called today.  We mostly use Cisco gear for networking and have dedicated switches for iSCSI and VMotion traffic.  We have two of everything – our company’s IT services are split across two datacenters.  Each datacenter will be a hot recovery site for the other.

So what does our DR solution entail?  Well, some fairly advanced technologies:

Virtualization: VMware VI3, release 3.5

DR Automation: VMware Site Recovery Manager

Replication: EMC Celerra Replicator V2

Snapshot consistency: EMC Replicator

Oddly enough, looking at the list, only one of the technologies is shipping and in my possession today (VMware VI3).  Hmmm… can you say, “Project risk”?

I first saw VMware Site Recovery Manager at a VMworld 2007 presentation.  If it works, it will be impressive.  Automating the steps to configure and power on VMs and a central place to store the DR “run book” will be sweet, to say the least.

One of the advantages of having EMC storage equipment is that they own VMware (or at least the controlling interest).  This means there’s a pretty good chance that their storage platforms will be among the first certified to work with VMware products.  Sure enough, my Celerras will work upon release of SRM with a firmware/code upgrade.  The code is shipping on new product; however, EMC has a policy that delays certification by 90 days for installing/upgrading to current product.  That puts us in the June time-frame.

The Celerra code upgrade provides a new version of Celerra Replicator that replicates iSCSI LUNs.  To ensure application consistency for applications such as Exchange and SQL Server, EMC Replicator must be used.

This is the high-level plan: application-consistent snapshots, SAN/IP storage-based replication and SRM to run it all at the end.  Yes, we have some physical servers = HP-UX, AIX, etc. and too bad their story won’t be interesting.

So while I’m waiting for product to GA, I’m trying to get our VI3 platform up and stable.  Stay tuned for progress on that front.