How would you like to have your data center situated in a basement one floor below six hot tubs, each containing 1,000 gallons of water? And to make matters worse, you don't have any fail-over site in the event of a disaster?
That is the situation facing Jeffrey Pelot, CTO at Denver Health and Medical Center.
''An actual failure at our main site served to highlight the problems inherent in having no disaster recovery infrastructure,'' said Pelot.
The hospital now is planning to add a nearby disaster recovery (DR) facility so it can duplicate its various configurations at another completely separate campus location.
It will utilize snapshot, remote IP copy and replication technologies to accomplish this. But all that takes money and the hospital doesn't have enough in the 2005 budget to cover it.
''We've had to push our DR spending plans into 2006,'' said Pelot.
Finding a Way
So how do you afford expensive DR projects in the face of tight budgets and a dozen other vital projects vying for priority? One way to cut costs is by prioritization of the data that needs to be fully protected.
Chip Nickolett, a DR specialist from Comprehensive Solutions, a DR consultancy, suggests evaluating systems, data, infrastructure and business operations in terms of categories of DR protection based on specific business requirements.
For example, Tier 1 might be recover within 24 hours, Tier 2 might be recover within 72 hours, and Tier 3 might be recover within 10 business days.
''It's all a question of how much data can be lost from the point of the disaster going backwards,'' said Nickolett.
Take the case of The Members Group, an Iowa-based company that provides card processing and mortgage services for credit unions. The company is implementing an IP SAN by StoneFly Networks for its DR set up.
It has a primary site in Des Moines, Iowa and replicates its data to another site in Minneapolis. As it didn't have the money to build its own redundant data center, it kept costs down by renting space for its hardware at a network services provider.
According to Jeff Russell, Members Group CIO, this proved to be the make/break point of being able to implement its DR technology.
''Having our systems hosted remotely saves us about one third of the total costs of implementing a DR solution,'' said Russell. ''Renting made the project possible.''
But even then, the company can't afford to hook up all of its 60 servers to the IP SAN. Therefore, it has prioritized its applications so that only 25 servers need be hooked into the StoneFly DR system.
''From a business standpoint, we decided that those servers that aren't required to run critical business applications would not be on the IP SAN,'' said Russell. ''We also went through the business requirements of our applications to determine which ones have to be protected in real time, which need to be up within four hours, and others we can afford to have down for as long as eight hours.''
Slow Adoption
While the events of Sept. 11 and the 2003 New York City blackout have prompted some firms to invest more heavily in DR, the overall numbers are surprisingly unimpressive.
It would appear that the harsh realities of the current economic climate have largely curtailed the anticipated rise in spending.
''We see DR spending going down slightly, but spending in high-availability is going up,'' said Roberta Witty, an analyst with Gartner Inc, a major industry analyst group.
According to Gartner, DR spending did accelerate in 2002, especially in the mainframe arena. In the past two years, though, mainframe DR budgeting has been slashed, canceling out the up-tick in high availability spending for the Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms.
But, Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions at Chicago-based IT consultancy and infrastructure firm Forsythe Technology, said that trend seems to be turning around and purse strings are loosening on certain platforms.
''I have seen a three-to-five percent increase in DR technology spending,'' said Croy.
Witty says part of the weakness in spending is that DR is regarded as purely an IT function. Actually, the subject belongs to senior management and falls under the broader category of business continuity. Yet, IT tends to either hold onto the function or is saddled with it.
''It is vital to have senior management sponsorship for DR planning,'' said Witty.
Without top management involvement, the budgetary realities of DR are often greatly under-estimated.
The IT folks at Deutsche Borse AG, the German exchange for stocks and derivatives, for example, only focused on the thousands of technical details of their OpenVMS-based cluster over two sites situated five kilometers apart.
What came after was a rude awakening -- the financial side of the DR equation required just as much planning and detail as the technical side.
''As well as the technical details, you have to plan the financial things in the same depth,'' said Michael Gruth, head of systems and network management at Deutsche. ''There is no getting around the fact that whatever you do, it is going to be expensive.''
This article was first published on CIOupdate.com. To read the full article, click here.
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