Datacenters and ROBO Sites

A number of technologies available in the market cater to the requirements of data centers to the last detail. High availability is usually a prominent feature along with enhanced business continuity. Needless to say, these technologies are very expensive.

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery solutions for remote office branch office (ROBO) setups differ vastly from datacenters. While no expense is spared in providing infrastructural capabilities at datacenters, IT teams adopt a best effort approach while building remote offices. Disruptions at the remote office can seriously impact revenue as most of the business deliverables are provided from the remote location. The staff headcount at remote offices is also significantly more.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity is an enterprise’s ability to continue delivering goods and services with acceptable levels of productivity after a business disruption.

Disaster recovery on the other hand, is the ability to restore systems, services and applications after a disruption such as an outage. Disaster recovery can be thought of as an integral component that goes into the organization’s business continuity solution.

Deploying Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery in a ROBO Ecosystem

Datacenter environments are very structured. They host most of the mission critical applications and services and most of the specialized staff are located there to manage them. BCDR initiatives are backed by ample funds and lots of planning. The result is a highly resilient and available solution.

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery solutions at ROBO sites are more application centric. Very few mission critical applications are hosted at the branch location. Consequently, infrastructure is not given that much priority. Besides, if the number of remote locations is higher, even a few applications per remote location would cumulatively add up to a huge manageability challenge for IT teams. Seemingly trivial outages would spread and spiral out of proportion.

Application performance and service delivery largely depend on effective consumption from customers. If availability and performance are severely hampered at the remote locations owing to frequent outages and an infrastructure lacking in flexibility, the enterprise’s overall productivity takes a hit and the end user experience is severely hampered.

Technological Landscape and Customer Needs

Resiliency is the core focus area that has been driving IT strategies towards innovation in recent times and will continue to be a crucial factor in the days to come.

Virtualization – This is one of the most frequently chosen technology deployments for benefits such as:

• vMotion computing and storage capabilities
• Commoditization of physical hardware and infrastructure through abstraction
• Minimum impact on service up time due to physical server failure, thanks to a highly available, commonly deployed configuration

Cloud Based Solutions – Virtual platforms can be taken a step further through public, private or hybrid clouds to facilitate an extra tier of abstraction. Software control on-demand based access to and use of processing as well as storage infrastructure.

SaaS – Regardless of the impact a disruption can have on business, SaaS applications can ensure that systems are always up and running. This is true both in the case of applications in the public domain such as Salesforce and Office 365, as well as those that are designed and deployed in-house.

Next Gen Apps and Mode 2 IT – Mode 2 IT is focused on accelerating operational speed. The databases of next gen applications are not restricted within physical locations but are deployed across distributed architectures that can be scaled to meet operational demands. Other benefits include device agnostic accessibility from anyplace, anytime. The applications are deployed in a self healing ecosystem that is committed to operational availability, reliability and consistency.

End user patterns have also evolved substantially over the years. However, the flip side of building robust systems is that customers tend to take for granted continuous availability of and access to systems. This in turn creates the demand for higher performance and narrower windows for downtime.

Mobile Access – Users today access systems from a variety of devices regardless of their physical location.

Always Up and Running – Consumers today have come to expect 24/7 access and support regardless of outages, even despite downtime for implementing fixes, patches, upgrades and enhancements.

Higher Expectations – Social media has raised the bar for business availability in recent times. For instance, enterprises with large data repositories such as Google experience at least one disk malfunction every few minutes. Yet, the end user never perceives an outage that has occurred in the background as services are never interrupted.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have made business and social communication overlap and business executives expect the same level of application delivery from both streams.

Current BCDR Scenario for ROBO Sites

BCDR solutions at ROBO locations are deployed on a lower scale than those found in data centers. Besides which, there are processing, storage and connectivity requirements at each location that necessitate:

Local copies of data – As per the 3-2-1 backup rule in business continuity, all data at a site must have at least two locally accessible copies so that operations can be restored quickly. However, this leads to a highly complex IT environment at the ROBO location which impacts the BCDR solution’s flexibility.

Onsite IT administration – The presence of trained IT staff at the ROBO location during an outage is imperative as real time data and their corresponding copies are available only locally. However, there is often a shortage of trained personnel at each site and recovery procedures are delayed while the nearest IT staff travels to the location..

Local Security – Many of the security related vulnerabilities are location specific such as environmental hazards or denial of service (DoS) attacks which can lead to business interruptions and loss of data.

Conclusion – Current BCDR solutions are built in such a way that they need to be managed at the location and consequently fall short of what is required in a ROBO environment.

BCDR Solutions in ROBO Environments – The way Forward

Data consolidation is a crucial component of any present day Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery solution for ROBO sites. However, data consolidation also implies that ROBO users rely heavily on their WAN connections to access remotely hosted applications. This impacts the end user experience. Even in the case of up and running systems, connectivity tends to suffer when services and users are separated by large distances.

Consolidation – All data consolidation happens at the data center. Frequently used data is cached at the ROBO location for local processing needs. These tasks can be executed at LAN speeds and without relying on the WAN connection. Edge location data is transmitted and stored securely at the data center. This way, initial data center investments yield better returns.

Centrally Managed Solution – Trained IT personnel manage ROBO locations from a central dashboard at the data center. Security capabilities are also orchestrated centrally. ROI numbers are once again improved by consolidating backups while the entire ROBO infrastructure can be managed efficiently. Data protection can be staged consistently through vCenter integration and storage arrays at the data center.

Operational Efficiency – WAN Optimization techniques assist in consolidating compute and storage tasks of services at the data center. Application acceleration techniques further ensure that user experience is smooth and hassle free.

However, some mission critical and location specific applications come with compute requirements at the edge device for business continuity. In the case of such services, compute and storage activities are bifurcated into two separate entities. Compute tasks are executed locally at the ROBO site while data consolidation is carried out at the data center. End user experience is improved through a better LAN performance. Operational efficiency and continuity are facilitated even when the WAN connections goes down. With such a setup, branch locations rely less on WAN connectivity and can sustain operations during hours, days or even weeks of network disruption.

Anticipatory Monitoring – Application and network performance across all the ROBO locations in the infrastructure can be viewed in a snapshot, analyzed and controlled. Admin teams are notified well in advance when application and network output deviates from daily performance patterns. Issues and interruptions to services can be rectified quickly such that enterprise deliverables meet and also go beyond business SLAs.

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