So my company set about to finally create a viable disaster recovery plan. Er, well, at least our IT department did. The rest of the organization thinks having a solid, fully developed and tested overall business continuity plan can wait. After all, it’s not sexy. It won’t garner newsworthy headlines. It won’t make us money. Besides, who has the time? Sound familiar? Thankfully, our director of IT at least gets that, from an IT perspective, we needed one. So I get together with the brain trust, hash it out with our consultants, and get one developed, tested, and just about completed once I haul my butt over to the east coast to complete our last phase in a day or so. That was all sooo last year. 

What did a year buy us? (along with a substantial sum involving many zeros and commas invested) 

Fully virtualized, bicoastal, server environment…check

Centralized SAN consolidating all data with auto-replication to secondary site…check

Enterprise-wide MPLS WAN deployed for increased and flexible network connectivity…check

Enterprise grade remote access platform…check

Conversion of our secondary data-center on the east coast to a fail-over site…check

Well, this is the makings of a great DR plan. I mean, what more could I ask for, right?

Heh..heh..heh…my director should have thought twice before asking me that! I mean what else could we possibly need to execute a controlled and orderly fail-over to the secondary site should our west coast data-center take a dump, or vice versa in a time-efficient manner?

Currently, we use several monster scripts and additionally have to manually do some setting and network configuration changes to affect Tier 1 systems and full network failover to the secondary DR environment. Maybe 8-12 hours total of work depending on the severity of the disaster including initial disaster and site impact assessments. Pretty good compared to the nightmare that was our DR plan before in the traditional server environment. In those days, we would have been looking at about a week at least to get our tier 1 applications fully restored and up and running along with network operations failed over. Not a pretty sight at all. I shudder to think if we ever had to go through that with the original setup.

 Enter VMWare SRM (Site Recovery Manager)

I have started looking into this baby and let me tell you, this seems like just the ticket for what we are looking for.

So what is VMWare SRM? Well, here’s the blurb from their fact sheet:

“VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a new VMware 

Infrastructure 3-based solution that is tightly integrated with Dell 

EqualLogic PS Series storage to offer centralized disaster recovery 

management, automation, and testing for a virtualized datacenter. 

The integrated solution  utilizes the PS Series’ native Auto- 

Replication feature, integrated directly into Site Recovery Manager 

using specialized storage adapter software developed by Dell.  SRM 

enables non-disruptive, automated testing of recovery plans and 

automates the recovery process, while the PS Series supplies cost 

effective and easy-to-configure replication over existing IP networks. 

The core server virtualization platform that provides IT environments 

with the tools to help reduce the cost and complexity of managing 

their IT infrastructure now expands to simplify disaster recovery as 

well.  Storage and server virtualization solutions from VMware and 

Dell provide the infrastructure for the fully virtualized data center, 

enabling a dynamic, highly automated computing environment.”

Sales-speak eliminated, what this add-on should do is effectively cut our fail-over times in the event of disaster to at least half of our original estimates. Depending upon the severity, they claim even shorter times for automated execution of the disaster plan!

The beauty of this solution lies in its tight integration of the VMWare platform as well as the SAN platform we are currently using in production. This means that implementation is as simple as drop-in placement and configuration because it leverages our existing infrastructure technology. Financially, it provides a compelling argument in relation to overall long-term ROI versus our initial investments. In fact, it actually enhances the ROI overall in relation to our total virtualization/SAN/DR project as the last puzzle piece.

Now I’m the type of person that needs to see to believe so you can bet your bottom dollar I’m gonna be testing this sucker out before we even think of spending a penny. Until I see it work in our environment, it’s just a lot of pretty words on paper. So until then, the jury is out. Stay tuned.