Archive for February, 2011

Moshe Yanai Joins Axxana Board of Directors

There are two ways to judge what is important to people: How they spend their money and how they spend their time.  When Moshe Yanai first invested in Axxana, we saw it as an important endorsement of what we are doing.  Moshe has been the recognized leader and visionary in the storage industry for two decades and has positively altered the strategic direction of technology giants IBM and EMC.  You only have to look at the success of EMC’s Symmetrix, or Diligent and XIV, which were acquired by IBM, to understand the importance and value of Moshe.  The technologies that Moshe’s companies delivered truly changed the course of not only the companies, but the storage industry itself.

Everyone has a different capacity to invest.  On one end you have people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.  On the other end you have people like me. I’ll leave it to Moshe to decide whether the financial investment he made in Axxana was a big investment or a small investment.  But time is different from money. Everyone has exactly the same amount of time to invest: 24 hours.  So, when Moshe Yanai agreed to join the board of directors of Axxana, I think he made a huge investment.  Together, we will build another great success story.

For those who aren’t members of the Yahoo Group: Discuss Business Continuity,  I thought it would be useful to share some excerpts from a recent discussion.  This question was posted by Bill Perschke:

If you don’t have both a High Availability site locally and a replicated site for system maintenance and disaster recovery some distance away, would it be best to have just the HA site or the replicated disaster recovery site?

With regard to the HA option, Kathleen Lucey, President of Montague Risk Management, and a business continuity management expert pointed out:

If what you are talking about is local clustering in the same site, then I would not consider this to be HA.  The protection afforded by a same-site clustering solution is limited to failover to the designated backup server in the event of a failure of the primary.  A larger local event could take down the entire cluster, and so this is not really HA, but more properly local hardware backup. Read the rest of this entry »

BCM Lifecycle from the British Standards Institution

If you work in the area of Business Continuity Management (BCM), you are probably aware of BS 25999, published by the British Standards Institution.  BS 25999 is the Institution’s standard for BCM.  BS 25999 was actually published in two parts:

• BS 25999-1:2006 Business continuity management. Code of practice.
• BS 25999-2:2007 Business continuity management. Specification.

The first publication deals with the should of the standard.  If an organization is considering the development or enhancement of a business continuity management program, the publication provides a comprehensive set of factors that the organization should consider.  It is a set of recommendations and guidelines, not a set of requirements.

The second publication deals with the shall of the standard, meaning that, if an organization wants to claim that they have met the standard, as certified by the BSI, then these are the things that the organization must do. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Your Organization Prepared to Continue Operations During Civil Unrest and War?

The U.S. Department of State has issued travel warnings to U.S. citizens for thirty-one (31) countries.  According to their website:

“Travel Warnings are issued when long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable lead the State Department to recommend that Americans avoid or consider the risk of travel to that country…”

A Rush Hour Traffic Jam

One of my colleagues in the U.S. was recently stuck in a very bad traffic jam, trying to get home before a record snow storm hit. When I talked to him, I decided that the traffic jam and the snow storm are a good analogy for a data center disaster. And I am now convinced that the way the IT world thinks about disaster recovery is wrong.

Imagine a data center is a city, and the data are all of the people in the city, the disaster is a snowstorm, the recovery center is the nice warm fire at home, and the wide area network that connects the data center to the disaster recovery site is the highway that gets the people home. In today’s disaster recovery, the disaster planning team together with the business heads decide which data, or in this analogy, people, are important enough to use the highway to get out of the city before the disaster arrives. We don’t worry about the rest of the people. After all, they aren’t important enough to protect. Read the rest of this entry »