In previous posts, I’ve explored differing aspects of concerns regarding orchestrations from a management level on Application Deployment, particularly in hybrid environments, and what to both seek and avoid in orchestration and monitoring in Cloud environments. I believe one of the most critical pieces of information, as well as one of the most elegant tasks to be addressed in the category of orchestration is that of Disaster Recovery.

While Backup and Restore are not really the key goals of a disaster recovery environment, in many cases, the considerations of backup and data integrity are part and parcel to a solid DR environment.

When incorporating cloud architectures into what began as a simple backup/recovery environment, we find that the geographic disbursement of locations is both a blessing and a curse.

As a blessing, I’ll say that the ability to accommodate for more than one data center and full replications means that with the proper considerations, an organization can have, at best a completely replicated environment with the ability to support either a segment of their users or as many as all their applications and users in the event of a Katrina or Sandy-like disaster. When an organization has this consideration in place, while we’re not discussing restoring files, we’re discussing a true disaster recovery event including uptime and functionality concerns.

As a curse, technical challenges in terms of replication, cache coherency, bandwidth and all compute storage and network require considerations. While some issues can be resolved by the sharing of infrastructure in hosted environments, some level of significant investment must be made and crossed off against the potential loss in business functionality should that business be faced with catastrophic data and functionality loss.

For the purposes of this thought, let’s go under the assumption that dual data centers are in place, with equivalent hardware to support a fully mirrored environment. The orchestration level, replication software, lifecycle management of these replications, management level ease of use, insight into physical and virtual architectures, these things are mission critical. Where do you go as an administrator to ensure that these pieces are all in place? Can you incorporate an appropriate backup methodology into your disaster recovery implementation? How about a tape-out function for long term archive?

In my experience, most organizations are attempting to retrofit their new-world solution to their old-world strategies, and with the exception of very few older solutions, these functions are not able to be incorporated into newer paradigms.

If I were to be seeking a DR solution based on already existing infrastructure, including but not exclusive to an already existing backup scenario, I want to find the easiest, most global solution that allows my backup solution to be incorporated. Ideally, as well, I’d like to include technologies such as global centralized Dedupe, lifecycle management, a single management interface, Virtual and Physical server backup, and potentially long term archival storage (potentially in a tape based archive) into my full scope solution. Do these exist? I’ve seen a couple solutions that feel as if they’d solve my goals. What are your experiences?

I feel that my next post should have something to do with Converged Architectures. What are your thoughts?