The Interview: Joe Ross, Involta Sales Engineer
The Topic: Virtualization Trends
Virtualization has had a big impact on disaster recovery trends, hasn’t it? Absolutely. The industry has gone from physical to virtual and now from virtual to automated virtualization. With each change came a new way of planning and opened the door for companies of different sizes to have robust DR plans for their entire IT infrastructure.
What’s the difference between virtualization and automated virtualization? Before virtualization a company had to have matching equipment on both sides of its environment at double the cost. Virtualization allowed companies to consolidate that equipment but it still came with the challenges of many moving parts. During the recovery process there are all these physical tasks that have to be done by physical people, i.e. getting the DR system up and running, writing new IPs for servers. Physical people doing physical work in a virtualized world still costs money and still includes things like human error. Automated virtualization eliminates a lot of this physical work making for a more reliable DR plan with faster recovery times at cheaper costs.
Faster recovery times at cheaper costs sounds like a real game changer.
It is. Involta’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) product that includes automated virtualization not only changes the way people do replication, it also opens the door for businesses of all sizes to be able to afford to do DR. Before DRaaS, doing replicated SANS was still costly and usually reserved for larger enterprise companies. When virtualization first came out, it was really expensive to put the software on the SANS and there were additional costs to send the data across the SANS. So most companies weren’t doing real time replication but more of these nightly snapshots.
With DRaaS companies can get near real time data replication with very timely recovery points. Additionally, they don’t have to heavily invest in replicating storage systems because its storage agnostic and they can get really granular with what they choose to replicate. Essentially, I can replicate a single machine and send the data to a storage agnostic system.
This is bringing the near real time RPO and RTO recoveries to smaller markets because it significantly reduces costs by requiring only a minimal capital investment and low monthly recurring costs.
What are some of the biggest problems with recovery in a virtualized data center and how does DRaaS eliminate those problems? The way to get to Carnegie Hall was “practice, practice, practice”. The main impediment to overcome is the lack of practice by organizations and that is overcome by a service that enables anytime use of the tool without risk to the production environment.
Is there a preferred approach to disaster recovery today? For both enterprise markets and small businesses, DRaaS is the preferred approach.There aren’t a lot of products out there that have the functionality that enterprise businesses need but that also fit the cost model of small businesses.
So with all of these changes, how is virtualization simplifying disaster recovery trends? The business world has pretty much gotten the message about becoming virtualized. What DRaaS brings to the table is easier technology, cost effectiveness and the automation of your disaster recovery plan.
