It is highly important for all businesses to have Disaster Recovery (DR) plans in place for situations where downtime or data loss could represent a substantial issue that could impact on a business’s ability to carry on with its operations effectively. Here at ESDS we have developed our own in-house cross-platform Disaster Recovery solution that will provide our clients with the best protection available against data loss when disaster strikes; furthermore, we believe that it is important to deliver such solutions at a price that suiting for our clients as the use of the eNlight cloud in our DR plans means that savings of up to 90% can be achieved when choosing ESDS for this purpose.

Choice of Hardware

Our DR solutions enable customers to choose their own hardware configurations at their end because the use of the x86-based eNlight cloud for DR/backup purposes means that there is no designated design for the proprietary hardware on the client’s side. A number of our corporate clients already had their IT infrastructures based around HP UNIX or IBM AIX systems for which there weren’t a great deal of solutions available that could fulfill their DR requirements, but have been able to fully integrate their systems with our Intel-based cloud architecture.

Scalability

Scalability is important in a Disaster Recovery environment because the need for resources could grow very quickly, especially if disaster strikes, meaning that redundancy needs to be built in from the start so this extra demand can be met when required. eNlight is a cloud infrastructure that can be expanded as demand dictates and for DR this provides the ultimate solution because extra storage capacity will always be on tap; this is where the cost savings are achieved because you will only ever be paying for the resources that you are confident you will need.

Value for Money

The eNlight cloud has been designed so that businesses only pay for the resources that they are consuming, as opposed to purchasing pre-defined plans that have set resource allocations. Within the context of DR this can be incredibly beneficial to the end user because it means that they will only ever end up paying for these resources when disaster strikes.

Synchronization with the eNlight Cloud Solutions

The ESDS DR system is designed to provide constant synchronization with the eNlight cloud so that the data that has been backed up is always a copy, which can be relied on in the event of data loss occurring at the primary site. eNlight has been designed to offer real-time seamless integration with primary platforms so that zero downtime can be achieved when performing activities including system upgrades and data migration between different platforms at the primary site.

Importance of Having Disaster Recovery Plans

DR plans should form part of the responsibilities of any Business Continuity department because with so many businesses relying on their websites or the internet in general to provide them with a source of income, the loss of customer data or other events that could impact on their online presence could affect these income flows greatly. Having a DR plan in place will allow a business to recover from any disasters in a relatively short period of time because there will be provisions in place to restore data that has been lost as well as to reinstate hardware resources that have been impacted.

When putting together a Disaster Recovery plan, there are several crucial factors that will need to be considered so that the final DR is as effective as possible; these include:

• Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) – This is the amount of downtime a business can cope with before the impact of the downtime will be sustained and more long term
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – The RTO is the amount of time in which a business should be able to restore its systems to a point that will allow it to carry out the impacted operations, even if this is in a limited function
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – This is the point to which a business can cope with data loss; as every business has their own backup routines with some having constant synchronization in place and others with daily, weekly and month backups, data loss could occur when a DS solution has to be implemented to its full effect.