Be ready! Choose the right Disaster Recovery solution to make DR Rehearsal a seamless process

ComputeExperts · ‎03-03-2021

Learn how and why it’s critical for your business to adopt the right disaster recovery solution—one that provides seamless rehearsal options and removes risks and complexities.

Plenty of studies show you how industries and institutions that faced severe downtime lost one or more critical applications, resulting in losses of millions of dollars. While downtime and monetary loss is one area of negative impact when disaster strikes in various forms, loss of data is equally significant.

Over the years, regulatory bodies like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have published and emphasized the need for business continuity plans for financial institutions in India. These type of regulatory bodies exist in many countries and, in fact, business continuity plans are mandatory in many cases.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is one component of a business continuity plan (BCP). This is what enables your organization to create a replica of applications and keep a consistent copy of data in a geographically distant location, or DR site. This helps minimize the impact of any disaster to your business.

While having a DR site is important, it is equally necessary to verify the readiness of these sites to act when needed. This readiness check is referred to as a Disaster Recovery Rehearsal, another critical process in BCP. For example, RBI recommends that institutions perform rehearsal once annually.

Because what is the point in having even multiple DR sites if they don’t react when required?

What is so critical about DR Rehearsal?

DR Rehearsal is a laborious process which demands a great amount of caution and planning, as one wrong step can lead to downtime and data loss.
The most common DR Rehearsal procedure requires downtime and organizations struggle to find that time. Note that DR Rehearsal is not a momentary procedure and may takes hours of time.

Considering the risks, I recommend adopting a DR Rehearsal solution that:

Provides seamless rehearsal procedures by auto detecting your DR setup and understanding your applications, servers, and databases
Advocates zero downtime to perform this drill, so you don’t have to plan for any downtime, allowing you to perform periodic rehearsals without disturbing your environment
Generates a report with the recovery time, data consistency and other indicators to verify your recovery objectives are met

One business continuity solution to consider: Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX) from HPE, which addresses the most critical challenges. SGLX offers patented, out-of-the-box, non-disruptive DR Rehearsal solution which means you do not need to plan downtime of your production environment. With Serviceguard for Linux, you can trigger DR Rehearsal operations anytime—all with a few clicks in an easy-to-use GUI. Simply leave the complexities to SGLX.

To learn more about SGLX Disaster Recovery and Rehearsal Solutions for your applications, visit hpe.com/servers/sglx. You can also try out some of SGLX's critical features here: HPE Serviceguard for Linux Trial Software.

Meet Compute Experts blogger Prabhanjan Gururaj, Solutions Specialist, HPE. Prabhanjan is a technologist focused in solving problems innovatively around mission-critical applications, analytics, and DevOps. He has 9 patents filed, 5 publications, and is an IEEE member and contributor.