Virtualisation can take the pain out of disaster recovery testing by simulating the process, says Veeam territory manager Warren Olivier.
"Regular testing is an essential part of any disaster recovery strategy," says Olivier, but "it's often overlooked because of the perceived high cost and potential for business disruption."
He explains that widespread belief holds that a proper disaster recovery test involves pulling the plug on the production environment and starting up somewhere else, which can be very expensive and disruptive: "But that's precisely why you need to test. You don't want to wait until a real emergency before you discover the gaps in your plan."
However, virtualised environments allow the simulation of the entire disaster recovery process, whether a single server or entire data centre, without any disruption.
"The fact that we automatically test every backup with SureBackup has always been one of the Veeam features that our customers love most," says Olivier. "With the latest release of Veeam Backup and Replication, we're now able to provide fully automated failover testing for the entire environment as well."
The speed of simulated testing is another advantage, says Olivier. "Full replicated environments can be booted up for testing within minutes.
"The only thing that makes it a simulation is that we don't pull the plug on the production site," he notes. "It's not a good idea to completely automate failover to a DR environment - it's a decision that a human needs to make. But, we can help ensure that when that decision needs to be made, there's a reliable, tested alternative to fail over to."
Disaster recovery testing is not an option, concludes Olivier. "The reality is that disaster recovery scenarios happen far more often than most people would like to think. Power fails, storage crashes and buildings burn down. The question for most organisations is not whether you will have to invoke your DR plan, but when. Regular testing is the only way to have peace of mind - as well as meet your compliance requirements."
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