Intelligent Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery could see a significant improvement in the coming years as multiple technologies come together to help enterprises get back on their feet more quickly and completely than in the past.

One of the trends pushing things along is intelligent automation. These integrated platforms consisting largely of software-drive routines can automatically kick in to perform service management functions and even make policy-based decisions to ensure business continuity in the face of a calamity. Many advocates tout intelligent automation as part of a broader business service management (BSM) strategy aimed at aligning enterprise resources with overarching business goals.

Virtualization is having an impact on DR as well. The latest version of Virtual Iron sets disaster recovery and availability high on the list of vital functions with features like network multipathing, snapshots and dynamic storage allocation.

Techniques to improve DR capabilities are walking hand-in-hand with new technologies designed to help lower costs. This article in Infostor highlights a number of ways the leading organizations are using things like disk-based backup, deduplication, WAN optimization and heterogeneous replication to cut down on the cost of remote DR facilities and improve recovery times.

The most difficult aspect of disaster recovery is justifying the cost of something that, hopefully, will never have to be used. But should that need arise, at least the newest systems offer better performance coupled with a break on the expense side.