During VMworld next week in Las Vegas, we will be revealing our upcoming VMware SRM 5-based solution, Cloud Replication.  Cloud Replication will be the first SRM 5 replication solution offered by a hosting services provider for continuous offsite application availability and disaster protection.  The data replication service meets the needs of customers seeking a solution for offsite disaster recovery, while providing cost-effective business continuity and application recovery.

Whether replicating applications from your internal data center to Hosting.com or replicating from Hosting.com data center to another, VMware and Hosting.com have engineered a winning combination to preserve your mission-critical application’s availability.

Cloud Replication protects organizations from data loss resulting from clinical disasters, such as a server failure or human error, and catastrophic disasters that can bring a company to a complete standstill. Hosting.com enables automated virtual machine replication of your virtualized environments from on-premise or from a Hosting.com datacenter to a Hosting.com datacenter recovery site. You can easily customize their replication and recovery settings in the Hosting.com Customer Portal by selecting individual virtual machines and the target Hosting.com recovery datacenter.

This marks a significant leap forward for our customers who need to protect on-premise virtual environments with reduced infrastructure investment and increased functionality.  Cloud Replication provides you with self-service functionality via the Customer Portal and an automated recovery solution that continues to utilize your existing infrastructure.  Better yet, you can control cost and exposure to disaster by individually selecting what level of protection (RPO) best serves your organization.

Cloud Replication delivers unprecedented control and flexibility to IT managers responsible for critical systems recovery at the time of a declared disaster. Administrators manage the failover and failback using the Customer Portal – a centralized location for disaster management.

How it Works

Your site and the Hosting.com recovery site stay in sync through reliable data replication as facilitated by VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. Using SRM, the virtual servers are continuously protected using RPO specific replication to the Hosting.com recovery site so that the VMs system state is identical at both sites. During a recovery, SRM shuts down the VMs at the primary site in precise order based on your priority selections and the corresponding VMs are brought online at the Hosting.com site in the same priority order.

The recovery Hosting.com environment provides you with a secure and remote copy of your data and applica­tions, and in the event of a clinical or catastrophic disaster, the ability to bring systems back online in less than 1 hour.

Non-disruptive Testing

Cloud Replication allows you to perform simulated non-disruptive and non-load bearing recoveries to your production environment as well as delivering graphical insight into the health of both the production environment and the recovery environment. When your server environment changes, you can easily make adjustments in the Customer Portal and re-validate your recovery plan without affecting the remaining production servers.

Architecture Diagram

More Information

Hosting.com presented a preview of the Cloud Replication solution during a webinar on August 24, 2011 titled, Maximizing VMware SRM and the Hosting.com Cloud. The webinar discussed enabling a cost-effective DR plan by combining the automation and cloud management capabilities provided through VMware with the inherent availability and redundancy offered through the Hosting.com cloud. Access the rebroadcast at: http://www.hosting.com/company/events/cloud-replication-webinar.

Hosting.com recently launched our SAN2SAN Replication recovery solution – providing continuous replication between your on-premise SAN environment to an identical SAN environment at a Hosting.com Datacenter.

SAN2SAN Replication is a fully managed service offering which leverages Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and Continuous Remote Replication (CRR) using EMC RecoverPoint.  What this means is your data will be securely and intelligently replicated to a world-class, geographically-dispersed Hosting.com datacenter while maintaining data consistency, also known as write order fidelity.

Hosting.com also leverages VMware Site Recovery Manager for orchestration.  In the event of a disaster or outage, with the click of a button, your mission-critical Virtual Machine guests will failover to a Hosting.com Datacenter with a guaranteed Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of four hours or less.

Traditionally, testing of disaster recovery plans was expensive and time-consuming.  And without testing, data integrity and application availability is a major risk.  According to Gartner, the cost of a full disaster recovery test with a tape-based system can cost $100,000 or more for each execution. SAN2SAN Replication includes quarterly failover testing to guarantee that in the event of a live failover, your mission-critical applications will be available and functional, giving you peace of mind.

In the event of a failover, Hosting.com will continue to protect your data at a Hosting.com tertiary recovery site — your mission-critical data and application are always protected.

SAN2SAN Replication Product Demonstration

EMC and Hosting.com hosted a webinar on August 3, 2011 titled, Recovering Enterprise Solutions in the Cloud. The webinar discussed how customers achieve their RTO (recover time objective) and RPO (recover point objective) with remote replication and cloud recovery services and featured a SAN2SAN Replication product review.  Access the rebroadcast at: http://www.hosting.com/company/events/recovering-enterprise-solutions-in-the-cloud-achieve-your-rto-and-rpo-with-remote-replication–cloud-draas–.

Historically, business continuity solutions have required companies to own multiple datacenters, employ highly technical support and maintenance staff, and spend up to 50% of your total IT budget to guarantee an always on infrastructure.

The cloud makes BCDR services accessible to more companies than ever, primarily due to the high availability inherent to cloud environments and the cost effectiveness of extending existing, on-premise infrastructures across multiple datacenters for failover and redundancy. Flexibility and scalability have for a long time been a limitation of physical infrastructure builds, while cloud environments allow for rapid scale, flexibility and control.

Application Recovery Considerations

When you are analyzing the availability and recovery of your mission-critical applications, consider the following list of highly-likely clinical disasters. Clinical disasters are three times more likely to occur than a catastrophic disaster and customers are significantly less understanding of outages due to a preventable, clinical disaster.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes

These can be natural or man-made, catastrophic or clinical. No matter the scenario, you must plan for such contingencies to avoid disastrous downtime. The best offense is a good defense.

Machines and hardware fail

It’s true. Software breaks and components fail. Eliminating single points of failure in the IT infrastructure is the only way to ensure that a failure doesn’t interrupt service or cause data loss.

Humans are not perfect

They make mistakes and sometimes do it on purpose. Even the most cautious can forget a step in an important process causing disastrous results.

Customer retention is costly, and re-acquisition is devastatingly expensive.

It takes a lot to earn customers’ trust, and after an IT disaster like loss of data or an extended outage in service, trust quickly evaporates.

12 Factors to Evaluate Your Preparedness

1. Have you determined your total cost of downtime for mission-critical applications?
2. Do you have a current Business Impact Analysis (BIA)/Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?
3. Are critical processes included in the document?
4. Do you have an off-site location for recovery?
5. Has your company determined and agreed to the level of service provided while in recovery-mode?
6. Have responsibilities for immediately following, and continuing through reestablishing normal operations been assigned to staff and management?
7. Have you identified the hardware and software required to recover mission-critical applications and/or functions?
8. Is a current copy of your DRP maintained off-site?
9. Do all users of the DRP have access to a current copy at the time of a disaster?
10. Is a communication plan (with multiple communication channels) included in your DRP?
11. Does the DRP include a Training, Testing and Exercise (TT&E) plan?
12. Has your team determined that DRP and TT&E have met all requirements to provide reasonable assurance?

Considering these twelve factors, does your organization have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place?

Hosting.com takes a consultative approach in assisting you with disaster preparedness. We also recognize that you require an affordable and reliable BCDR solution to meet your budgetary and business requirements. Contact us today (888-894-4678) to schedule a disaster recovery evaluation with one of our specialist.

As you face an increasing burden to meet government regulations, create uninterrupted user experiences, and safeguard against malicious attacks, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning is near the forefront of IT strategy and budget. Many organizations have a plan in place for disaster recovery but many factors could impact the effectiveness of an existing plan – is the plan updated each time a new system is brought online; has the plan been tested for recovery and failover; does the plan prioritize mission-critical applications.

Disaster Planning Statistics

• According to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, “93% of companies that lost their datacenter for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses without data management for this same period filed for bankruptcy immediately.”
• The IMF reduced Japan’s economic growth forecast to 1.4 percent this year from 1.6 percent as a result of the nuclear crisis.
• According to the Ponemon Institute, the probability of an unplanned datacenter outage over a period of 24 months is 95%.

There is a serious disconnect in the way organizations plan for outages – mostly due to 3 common misconceptions regarding disaster recovery.

DR Misconception #1: Most Disasters are Caused by Catastrophic Events

When companies do conduct disaster planning, 90% of business continuity budgets are targeted at catastrophic disasters rather than the more frequently occurring clinical events which include malicious attacks, viruses and more commonly human error. Millions of dollars of quantifiable losses occur due to clinical events.

The chart below details the causes of disasters – a clinical disaster is 3 times more likely to occur than a catastrophic disaster. In fact, 50% of outages turn out to be power or plumbing related.

DR Misconception #2: Direct Costs Constitute Most Outage Costs

During a short analysis time period, direct costs will prove to be substantial affecting productivity, direct revenue and the costs of executing a recovery. Our long-term research shows that a company’s indirect costs are more greatly affected by an outage – in fact, 2/3 of the overall costs of an outage are indirect in nature (see chart below). Examples of indirect costs include corporate reputation, future sales, SLA and compliance payouts, fines, and data loss. In particular to the loss of data, a company has to evaluate the value of the data, the recoverability and the time it will take to conduct the data recovery.

DR Misconception #3: All Disaster Recovery Plans are Created Equal

Certainly for anyone that has been in the disaster recovery planning business for a significant amount of time knows that the history of this industry says that you need to have a recovery plan for the entire organization application and business footprint.

We’ve found through our research and as indicated in the Forrester chart below, that the efforts of executing a recovery plan are spread equally across all three classes of applications – a mission-critical application has the same focus as a non-critical application. That type of planning is flawed – mission-critical, or bet-the-business applications, warrant a higher degree of focus and a more aggressive disaster recovery plan than a typical application.

With regards to testing, the costs associated with testing result in organizations conducting less tests and less testing substantially increases the data integrity risks. Gartner research shows that almost 50% of all tape restores fail – when an organization reduces their testing the likelihood of capturing failure is also reduced. Many organizations never perform a recovery from a test. This disregard for testing poses significant risks for companies using traditional recovery methods for their disaster recovery planning.

Considering these three misconceptions, does your organization have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place? Our next blog post will assist you in evaluating your disaster preparedness – stay tuned.

Hosting.com takes a consultative approach in assisting you with disaster preparedness. We also recognize that you require affordable and reliable BCDR solution to meet your budgetary and business requirements. We offer recovery solutions at a fraction of the cost compared to in-house and hot-site solutions with varying options of recovery time and recovery point objectives. View the Hosting.com Recovery Solutions.

Join our Cloud Replication Webinar on August 24 to learn how you can enable a cost-effective DR plan by combining the automation capabilities and simplistic replication provided through VMware with the inherent availability and redundancy offered through the Hosting.com Cloud.