Posts Tagged ‘EDR’

A Mother Warns Her Daughter

I’m a parent, and as my daughters get older, I give them warnings. I give them warnings for two reasons:

• So they will be aware of potential dangers
• So they will change their behavior

Unfortunately, with things that are dangerous, children often have to experience the consequences, before they believe the danger is real. If you’ve ever gotten even a mild burn from a hot stove, you know what I mean. The slightest burn may, unfortunately, be much more memorable than the warnings you received from your mother.

Over the past week Mother Nature gave a couple of warnings to people who live on the East Coast of the United States. The first was a relatively strong, but not massive, earthquake. The second was a relatively strong, but again not massive, hurricane.

Too many companies think about data protection after they’ve experienced a significant data loss, but not before. This time, companies got a couple of warnings from Mother Nature.  Next time, it may be more than a warning. Do you really have to get burned before you change your behavior?

Listen to your mother.

This week, as thousands of IT professionals converge at EMC World, many will be getting their first look at Axxana’s Phoenix System RP. The system, which integrates with EMC RecoverPoint and all RecoverPoint-supported platforms, forces IT professionals to change the way they think and to imagine what was previously thought impossible. Now it truly is possible for companies to protect all of their data over any distance through a wide range of disasters.  It is not only possible, but it is affordable for virtually any mid-sized and large enterprise customer. And thanks to RecoverPoint’s and the Phoenix System RP’s integration with VCE Vblocks, zero data loss over any distance is also possible for smaller companies that are leveraging public cloud infrastructures based upon VCE Vblocks.

If you look at the home page of our Axxana website, you will see that we have changed our banner this week to honor other great innovators. These individuals imagined and created what was previously thought impossible. The Wright brothers proved that flight was not just for birds, bees, and bats, but that man, too could fly. Alexander Graham Bell proved that people could remain connected and communicate, hearing each others’ voices over vast distances.  John Bardeen and his colleagues, who developed commercially available transistors proved that electronics could be made affordable for the masses, and Albert Einstein, well, he changed just about everything we thought about the physical world.

In his book, The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb explains how Europeans could not imagine black swans until they actually saw them.  Just like black swans, many will not believe that they can recover their data from the ashes, until they see the Phoenix System RP.  No one today  denies the existence of black swans, and everyone can imagine them. Soon, no one will doubt the ability to protect all data and recover it from the ashes, from the floods, from an earthquake, or from a building collapse.  If you are at EMC World, please stop by and see for yourself.  We are at Booth 605.

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 »

What happens when the hammer falls?

What’s the chance that you will be hit on the head with a hammer? What’s the probability that your data center will be hit by a major fire, a major flood, a hurricane, or an earthquake? Both are pretty low, right? If you are a disaster recovery professional, you’ve probably been asked at last once, “Why are you budgeting so much for disaster recovery, when these events are unlikely to happen?” Wouldn’t it be better to spend money on preventing or surviving things that happen frequently? Or better yet, wouldn’t it be better to spend money on things that will help the company grow? But just like a hammer to the head, big disasters can be very costly when they do happen. So we, as businesses, somewhat reluctantly, spend money trying to prevent those disasters that we can prevent and survive those that we can not prevent.

I was looking at some articles on the severity and frequency of accidents and found an interesting blog post by Bill Wilson who has worked in the nuclear power industry and writes about the prevention of industrial accidents. He wrote about Herbert William Heinrich, who worked for an American insurance company and published a book on the prevention of industrial accidents. His research found that for every fatal or severe accident, there were 29 minor injuries and 300 accidents that resulted in no injuries. He suggested that by eliminating the root cause of accidents that caused no injuries, companies could prevent most fatal accidents. The article shows how a dropped hammer can produce a wide range of results, from no injury to fatality, depending upon other circumstances around the dropped hammer, like whether someone was walking beneath the hammer and how high the hammer was when it dropped. But what is common to all of these events is that all injuries could be prevented by eliminating the dropping of the hammer.  It’s possible to imagine that all hammer dropping could be eliminated by tethering the hammer to the person carrying it.  When it comes to accident prevention, however, the problem with that approach is that the tether that prevents the dropped hammer does nothing to prevent the falling brick. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve continued to look at the data that was in Symantec 2010 Disaster Recovery Study. There’s a lot of very useful information in the study. Here’s some of what I found interesting:

• Only 20% of virtual environments are protected by replication or failover technologies
• 60% of virtualized environments are not covered in DR plans
• Actual downtime from outages is more than twice what companies expect
• 40% of DR tests fail to meet the RTO/RPO that have been set for the applications

That last one is very interesting. It’s hard to imagine anyone putting up with a 40% failure rate for long. I suspect some things will have to change, and soon. But given the tight budget times, it doesn’t mean that companies are going to spend more. In fact, 43% of companies said their disaster recovery budget would decline in the next 12 months.

At Axxana, our sole reason to exist is to provide disaster recovery capabilities to organizations, so you might think that declining budgets for DR are bad news, but they’re not. No, in the world of disaster recovery, when budgets get tight and service levels aren’t being met, something needs to change. And that’s when organizations look for new, more-innovative ways to provide data protection and disaster recovery. That’s what we offer. We have a new class of data protection, Enterprise Data Recording (EDR), that actually enables companies to meet RTO/RPO service levels, while lowering the cost of data protection.

Being passionate about what we do here at Axxana we have decided to share this and start blogging. All comments are welcome, we will greatly appreciate any information about who you are, what you do for a living and how to contact you, etc.

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