Avoiding an RGE (Resume Generating Event)

[SeanD_]

Avoiding an RGE (Resume Generating Event)

Quick, is your resume current? If your company experiences a significant outage it may (unfortunately) need to be. As the saying goes, this may be an RGE. Even if you’re boss doesn’t ‘let you pursue other opportunities’, the business may not be able to financially recover. Either way, you’re looking for a new job. What’s more, according to Symantec’s SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, 44% of SMB organizations said they would lose close to 40% of their data in the event of a disaster. Fortunately, there are new options enabling organizations to recover their business quickly without the significant expense of a dedicated offsite location and duplicate server/storage hardware often only afforded to organizations with significant capital and operational expertise.

We’ve been hard at work developing Backup Exec 2012 and how we can leverage virtualization and cloud to significantly enhance an organizations ability to recover from a local or site failure. In this blog, I’ll focus on the new Backup Exec 2012 Cloud DR Option and share some ideas that I’ll be delving into more at Vision.

As organizations evaluate recovery options, clearly there are choices of cost and recovery times (see figure). With the Cloud DR Option, we’ve partnered with Doyenz, a leading Recovery as a Service provider to enable application to be recovered in the cloud in less than 15 minutes. Yes, in less than 15 minutes the 300GB Exchange server your business depends on is up and running in the cloud. How do we do it?

We’re able to do this without any additional storage or server resources at the organization’s premises. Any application running in VMware 4.x-5.x is supported; Backup Exec V-ray integration for local granular file level recovery is fully supported. With this subscription service we are replicating the nightly Backup Exec jobs to the cloud (we only send the changed data after the first backup is complete) and each nightly job is available for a full application recovery in the cloud. By extending Backup Exec local data protection into the cloud, organizations now have multiple recovery options (based on type of failure), and perhaps most importantly, have the ability to test the recovery of the applications in the cloud.

It’s also important to realize that this service compliments cloud storage (e.g., Nirvanix). Replicating Backup Exec to cloud storage can certainly solve the offsite tape storage problem for organizations (and many organizations do look to this alternative), but this is not a timely recovery strategy (pulling 100GB over a 500kbps link will take weeks). This is where the Backup Exec Cloud DR Option compliments cloud storage. Think of them as fulfilling different roles RaaS, cloud storage, and local protection. Backup Exec manages the information for local data protection, can send an offsite copy to cloud storage (e.g., Nirvanix), and replicate to Cloud DR for full application level recovery in the cloud. It’s this continuum of recovery time and recovery point that is now afforded to organizations. Now your fully protected and you don’t need to keep your resume current.

I hope to see you at Vision this year where I’ll be spending more time delving into the Backup Exec cloud strategy and our new Recovery as a Service offerings.

Twitter @SeanDerrington