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RackWare Solutions
Disaster Recovery
OverviewBusiness Continuance via Disaster Recovery is an essential element of IT and takes on many forms. The high end consists of high availability solutions that provide real-time replication of systems. While these systems provide seamless continuity during outages they are large, complex, and expensive, justifiable to support only the most critical business applications. At the other end of the continuum, however, Disaster Recovery is little more than tape backup or backup to NAS which have complicated and lengthy restore procedures which take hours or days. A major improvement can be made in disaster recovery with a solution that provides business continuity in a model that simply extends the existing IT architecture into the Cloud.
How RackWare’s DR Solution Works
RackWare Management Module (RMM) provides a Disaster Recovery solution that builds on its Image mobility and elasticity features to bring economic Disaster Recovery to Enterprises. The building blocks of RackWare’s DR solution include Onboarding, Cloud Bursting, and the Policy Framework to automate necessary functions. Captured Images from production (origin) instances are cloned and pushed out to a local or remote DR site. Changes in production images are periodically synchronized with the remote images, keeping the original Host Image and the DR image in sync. In the event of an outage at the origin site, the up to date Image at the DR site can assume operations through RackWare’s fail-over mechanism. This provides significantly improved DR support over traditional tape or hard-disk backup, which would require hours or days to restore after the production systems operating system, applications, and data have been repaired. RackWare’s DR solution provides failover at a fraction of the cost of a fully replicated datacenter architected for high availability or clustering technologies.
Setting up a DR Image utilizes the basic fundamentals of RMM, beginning with capturing the origin Host. Then a clone of the Image is made, cloudified, and deployed at the desired cloud location. The resulting recovery Cloud Image does not need to be running continuously, and is only launched only during synchronization operations.
The origin Host Image can reside in remote storage (at the origin site) or on the local disk. If the Image resides on the local disk, the RMM configures the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on the Host and is used to take periodic snapshots of the Image. If the Image resides remotely, LVM is not required, and a snapshot operation is executed on the Image via the storage array management interface. In the background, an Image sync operation synchronizes any changes in the Image with the Image at the DR site.
Original Instance
Initial Cloning of Origin Instance into the Cloud
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Overhead on the origin Host is extremely small involving only resources to take a delta snapshot. Thus the data overhead of the WAN link incurs only the delta of information, keeping bandwidth needs and sync time to a minimum. It’s important that Image updates include user data, Operating System updates, and application installations and configuration changes so that the recovery image behaves exactly like the production image should a failover occur. The cloud DR feature supports all of these. While OS updates are more infrequent it is still important to ensure that kernel patches are kept in sync with the DR Image. When updating the OS, an image refresh operation is done from the RMM first before the sync to the CloudImage.
Should the production system be compromised or inoperable, the CloudImage is automatically launched and is running with the latest synchronized changes.
After the production instance is repaired and operational, it’s easy to restore the origin site to any up any changes made to the CloudImage in the cloud. When the origin site is restored to its operational state, the administrator can utilize the capture from cloud feature to refresh the original Image and synchronize any changes that occurred during the outage.
Original Instance User Conected to
Origin Instance OS, Apps, Data Recovery Instance
Original Instance DOWN
User Conected to Recovery Instance Failover to Recovery Instance
RackWare offers a DR solution that provides failover and failback capabilities of expensive replication systems at a fraction of the cost. To find out more, please visit www.
rackwareinc.com and request a free demonstration.
Original Instance User Re-conected to
Origin Instance Failback to Origin Instance
Recovery Instance OS, Apps, Data Syncing
from Recovery to Origin
About RackWare
RackWare brings intelligence and automation to the cloud, providing greater availability for enterprises, greater flexibility for enterprise IT users, and reduced costs for enterprise IT providers. Computing resources—physical, virtual, and cloud machines—can
