Improving the ROI on your Disaster Recovery budget
Disaster Recovery has traditionally been viewed as an insurance policy - a case of paying a large, annually recurring fee, to large IT Vendors or ‘Tier 1’ type service providers - only realising the benefit to a business when a disaster occurs.
Quantix is changing this outdated model. We are able to do this because we have no legacy investments to write off – unlike some other providers of DR services. We are breaking the mould and giving our customers the ability to use the same platform for development purposes, extended in-house maintenance windows and as a means to run regular failover tests, as well as act as the DR Service delivery infrastructure.
Typical examples of how customers try to achieve Business Continuity before Rapid Recovery include:
Hardware Replacement – This is typically a courier delivery of new hardware to replaced failed units in a disaster. This is typically a lower cost option, but this annual cost is dead money and there is a very long recovery time fraught with technical issues to get a site back on-line.
Recovery Sites for Staff – Companies pay a huge amount of money to have the ability to relocate staff to ready and waiting workstations. Or companies kit out spare dead space in an office “just in case”.
Duplicate Servers – Many companies buy duplicates of servers and due to the high licencing costs have them switched off gathering dust, just in case the system needs recovering. This is another good example of budget being spent that gives a very poor ROI.
Server Clustering - Synchronous Server Clustering is an good way of obtaining an excellent Recovery Point Objective. The main issues with clustering though across 2 sites are the high costs associated with it and the network performance to prove it effective. You not only have to fully licence the Operating System and applications on the HA servers, but need a huge site to site connection that will maintain a solid cluster state.
Building a DR Computer Room in alternative premises – If companies have spare floor space at an alternative office it is tempting to build a Disaster Recovery Suite. If this is done correctly with Fire suppression systems, Access Security, a Back Up Generator and a large enough WAN link to support users, this is a very expensive option. There is normally a lack of IT skills at the DR site and it is extremely difficult to obtain the same standards as a purpose built Data Centre.
Locating Servers in a Data Centre – The next natural progression is to rent co-location space in a Data Centre and host replicated servers. The major costs issue with this option surrounds the performance and size of internet connection required to provide bullet proof replication. Also hosting centers are predominantly concerned with selling rack space and bandwidth and don’t have the breadth of technical expertise on the ground to support a heterogeneous replicated environment. Typically customers end up putting in limited bandwidth to the DC to save costs, but in the event that users need routing to a recovery server at the DC the bandwidth will bottleneck and the skills aren’t onsite to support the failover.
