Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2016
Unless availability and security extends to the very edges of the network, the organisation cannot ensure uniform service delivery, compliance and efficiency, says Veeam.
A significant challenge for IT leaders is ensuring that data is available, even without a dedicated local IT team to govern and control it. The 2016 Veeam Availability Report showed that half of the respondents only test backups on a monthly basis or less. And of those who do perform the tests, just 26% test more than 5% of their backups. This means that the vast majority of backups are not verified and could fail. This percentage is even higher when it comes to remote offices and branch office (ROBO) locations.
Claude Schuck, country manager of Veeam SA, notes that business and IT leaders need to recognise the unique needs of ROBOs. "For instance, teams based in remote offices need constant, reliable and fast access to essential data, without sacrificing data security and integrity," he says.
"Because data doesn't just live in the data centre, we often face challenges when data is put to use in the field at ROBOs. But traditionally, the best solutions for a remote office rarely lined up to what most companies could afford to implement," says Schuck. "The good news for ROBOs is that it's now easier than ever - with the help of the right solutions - to extend data centre backup, replication and availability capabilities all the way out to the edges of an entire organisation."
Your data centre extends to ROBOs
Schuck says the modern data centre is highly virtualised, uses modern storage solutions and has a cloud strategy in place; all of which are critical to a ROBO's success. However, because of each ROBO's specific needs, there are no real roadmaps for building and implementing architecture for a remote office.
"Virtualisation has had a huge impact on ROBOs. From reduced equipment footprints and lower setup costs, to simpler management workloads and faster deployment of new services, virtualised environments have become the natural choice for ROBOs."
Modern storage systems have also made life a lot easier for ROBOs, says Schuck. "Whether it's a new solution rolled out to serve every branch or a solution that's just deployed on site, new storage solutions are helping ROBOs store - and more importantly backup and replicate - their data more intelligently."
The cloud, says Schuck, is now a suitable option to move and store backup and replicated data, unlike the leased private lines that are often a significant performance bottleneck to perform this task.
Best availability practices for branch offices
Many organisations struggle to select the best solutions for on-site and off-site backup, because there really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach for remote office architecture, says Schuck.
"Organisations often end up choosing between taking on-site backups, writing backups off-site or doing replicas both on and off-site - instead of considering how they could utilise them all."
"There is the long-promoted 3-2-1 rule for availability that can be the best solution in this situation. It states that there should be: three copies of important data, on two different media, with one off-site. The 3-2-1 rule is highly versatile and can address just about any failure scenario imaginable by ensuring that all data is both backed up in multiple locations, and also quickly recoverable."
Veeam says replicas are more suitable than backups in true disaster situations, when the recovery time objective (RTO) needs to be reduced to a minimum and all production loads need to be moved to another site as quickly as possible.
"Replicated virtual machines (VMs) are inventoried and ready-to-run VMs in their own right, so when the worst happens, they can be failed over very quickly on dedicated and similar hardware that's pre-deployed on the disaster recovery (DR) site. This is why replication needs a higher investment when it comes to storage and computing power at the DR site. Backups don't offer the same speed for recovery time objectives, but are more flexible and portable and require lower storage consumption," Schuck says. "Backups can be copied on different support media and are much more manageable when addressing day-to-day recovery scenarios typical in ROBO environments."
With a large number of sites and locations, companies need to make a choice about where to do their backups and replication.
Schuck says having backups taken on-site provides some important benefits:
* Backup times are fast because no information needs to be sent off-site;
* Restore times are fast because all data is very close to the host;
* New replication features open up new options such as creating a backup file and replicating a running VM at the same time.
Balancing budgets and business requirements
"It's widely understood and accepted that replication grants the greatest availability benefits for ROBOs because of the fast recovery times, but budgetary constraints often just allow for the use of backups," says Schuck.
"Generally speaking, setting up backups is a very versatile and cost-effective solution. Setting up replicated virtual machines grants prompt business continuity, but requires a higher infrastructure investment."
The real challenge, he says, is finding the right solutions for rolling out across diverse remote office environments. No two locations ever look exactly the same; they often are designed and deployed on different dates and include their own individual requirements. This can make it very difficult to roll out global backup and recovery policies across an entire organisation. It can also lead to increased inefficiencies and longer restore times.
"With a cost-effective hybrid solution in place that merges the advantages of on-site backup with the high availability and security offered by off-site replication, IT leaders can take control of this complex environment. They can ensure that everybody plays by the same rules and, regardless of the location, can recover data as quickly as the data centre at headquarters," Schuck says.
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