Features you want in a comprehensive service
Asset Recovery
In the previous blog we touched upon the manageability aspect of HP Helion and Veritas Continuity solution. As a continuation to the blog series, we bring yet another edition highlighting the Recovery Aspects of this solution.
Imagine an incident happens to your IT platform disrupting your business
Your enterprise is reliant on information, and the ability to access it through business applications and partners. Now, imagine what happens to your organization if it suddenly loses access to your applications, valuable information, and key systems. Perhaps from a major IT service outage or a catastrophic risk, including hurricanes, tsunamis, terrorism, or man-made disasters—either accidental or intentional, such as hacking attacks.
How ready your organization is might depend on how you respond to three questions:
- When was the last time you tested your continuity plan?
- Was your last continuity test considered a success?
- Who is responsible for getting your applications up and running after a disaster?
The HP Helion and Veritas Continuity solution is focused on providing a simple, managed DR solution at an optimum cost/TCO. The next few sections ensure how the solution aims to deliver these aspects.
Simple DR On-Boarding with HP Helion and Veritas Continuity
HP Helion and Veritas Continuity aims to solve complicated DR preparations via an innovative and simplified approach. Lets talk about how.
When you feel you need to take the discussions further we provide you with an assessment tool to run on the systems that you have identified as to be protected by DR. This assessment brings out the sizing needs on the HP Continuity site and notifies the systems identified can be supported under the service. Once the results have been evaluated, a price agreed for the service and the configuration of the HP Continuity site can occur. Regarding establishing connectivity with your data center to enable replication there are multiple ways of doing this but a dedicated VPN is the preferred approach.
To begin with, the solution appliances shall be deployed within the client’s data center site. These are virtual appliances responsible to discover, operate on the workloads as well as replicate data to the HP Helion Continuity center. For more details on the appliances refer to our previous blog.
Based on the discovery performed by the appliances the HP Helion and Veritas Continuity web console clearly showcases the managed assets (DR protected with our solution) and the un-managed assets (not DR protected).
So in essence building the secondary DR site on the HP Helion Continuity Cloud is simplified into an orchestrated, intelligent, automatic on-boarding workflow. The progress status of this process can be viewed on the web console.
To further increase cost benefits, the solution does not need the assets on the secondary DR site (HP Helion Continuity) in a passive running state. These assets will be powered on if and only if needed as a part of the disaster events. Only the bare minimum number of management and control appliances will continue to run on the cloud site. But storage will be dedicated, always available online and will be used to run the data replication.
This innovative approach adheres to the “pay-per-use” model and the customer can benefit drastically ensuring an optimized long term cost of the DR solution.
With the assets now protected in HP Helion Continuity cloud, the details of the configuration can be viewed using the HP Helion and Veritas Continuity web console.
The below screen capture depicts the asset status after DR configuration. It highlights the risks, replication lag, RPO, and also provides single click options to launch recovery operations.
Handling an invocation due to real disaster or rehearsal
When a disaster strikes, there may not be enough time to react. The downtime event may wipe off the entire data center or may impact the teams that manage the data center. In such situations, having a recovery plan in place is utmost important. Just having a recovery plan may not be sufficient since the local DR administrator may not be available to trigger the plan. The HP Continuity operations team receives from you an invocation and triggers the recovery plan from a remote location.
HP Helion and Veritas Continuity solution helps your business team create a comprehensive recovery plan using the Resiliency Plan feature. This is a runbook automation which helps in creating a recovery plan encompassing the entire data center. This plan can be built over time in collaboration with the HP Continuity operations team, such that the recovery of the entire data center can be achieved in a matter of a few clicks. The below screen shot depicts how a resiliency plan can be created simply by dragging the operations into the editor and associating assets to the plan.
Once a resiliency plan is created, the HP Continuity operations team can invoke it with a single click and monitor the progress of the recovery from a remote location. By virtue of the DR configuration, the assets have been continuously replicated to the HP Helion Continuity cloud. Thus the data up until the disaster has already made it into HP Helion Continuity cloud.
This provides the recovery of business critical assets within the stipulated RTO and RPO service level objectives no matter how worse the situation is.
To summarize, today we have taken a closer look at how HP Helion and Veritas Continuity enables enterprises to safeguard their businesses against disasters, in a very simple, orchestrated and cost optimized manner. The next article of this series shall shed more light on how the data is replicated between the customer data center and the HP Helion Continuity cloud.
