• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Live DR Replicas On-Demand

Live DR Replicas On-Demand

June 3, 2013 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Ideas in IT come in waves, and recently I’ve been hearing about a great capability: On-demand live replicas of production virtual machines. Want to test your DR environment? Spin up a live sandbox in the cloud or at a service provider using VMware ESX. And if there’s a real disaster, you can always run there for real!

Thanks to data replication, server virtualization, and cloud computing, it’s possible for anyone to have an on-demand sandbox!

VM-Enabled DR

Disaster recovery (DR to us IT folks) is incredibly hard to get working. So hard that I’ve often referred to the regular and predictable failure of DR tests as IT’s “dirty little secret” – we all know traditional tape recovery doesn’t work but no one wants to tell management they won’t have their systems for weeks in the event of a disaster! Backups on tape just aren’t a DR solution.

Traditionally, the only way to really build a DR system that worked was to invest in an active site concept, where the remote DR systems were always up and running, re-stocked with fresh data thanks to replication software. Some companies even went to the next level, building an active-active system where neither the “local” nor “remote” sites were truly the master and rotating between them periodically. Now that’s a DR setup!

But server virtualization offered a new prospect: Truly mobile systems that could run on disparate hardware locally and remotely. We began to see companies building truly-functional virtualized DR using data replication software from companies like Zerto, Falconstor, Veeam, Double-Take, and so on. Even the big guys got in on the act, with VMware, EMC, Hitachi, NetApp, and the rest offering array-based VMware-aware replication capabilities.

The combination of VM-enabled “go anywhere” servers and replication software was unbeatable and finally offers a real, functional DR option. Anyone relying on backup tapes for DR is, to be perfectly clear, acting imprudently.

Now Add Cloud Computing

But what of the cloud? It’s now possible to have on-demand virtual machines, thanks to infrastructure as a service (“IaaS”, which sounds like a movie alien). Stir in some data replication and cloud storage and suddenly you have an exciting new option: On-demand DR!

Considering how many companies are moving to cloud-based data replication, this seems like a slam dunk. Rather than “just” storing your data with a service provider, you can optionally bring up virtual machines there for testing or real disaster recovery!

These systems work similarly to Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery, in that they “reconstitute” a virtual machine’s image at a remote site and enable an administrator to start it up on demand. TwinStrata recently briefed me on their newfound ability to replicate and store consistent VM images in the cloud for DR purposes. And now Permabit’s new Replication feature gives OEMs and service providers a similar capability.

This isn’t technical wizardry. It’s more that these companies took a look at what they have (a consistent virtual machine disk image) and decided to put it to productive use. Now that live on-demand DR replicas are “a thing” I expect many other companies to jump on the bandwagon. Many probably already have, though I am unaware of them!

Stephen’s Stance

Anything that gives companies a hope of real, functional DR is a great innovation. Combining data replication, cloud computing, and server virtualization is a great mix in my book. Three cheers for live, on-demand DR replicas!

Note: I’m sure other companies are doing this, too. Please feel free to leave a brief comment with a pointer to your solution.

“Sandbox Setup” photo by Clover_1 (CCbyNC)

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But…
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage Tagged With: data replication, disaster recovery, Double-Take, FalconStor, infrastructure as a service, Permabit, server virtualization, TwinStrata, Veeam, VMware, Zerto

Primary Sidebar

The work of the information officer [should be] regarded as the natural dynamic extension of that of the librarian.

Douglas John Foskett

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    A Watch Guy’s Review of the Apple Watch

    April 27, 2015

    Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)

    August 4, 2011

    GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

    April 6, 2019

    Why Are PCIe SSDs So Fast?

    June 12, 2013

    10 Mysteries The Lost Finale Definitively Settled

    May 25, 2010

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    A High-Tech Water Heater? Yep! Introducing the A. O. Smith Vertex

    November 15, 2012

    Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

    June 26, 2017

    Cisco’s Trojan Horse

    September 15, 2014

    Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

    January 16, 2012

    Copyright © 2021 · Log in