Storage Tip: Tools assist proactive disaster recovery testing

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What seems to be the problem? Some enterprises may spend what seems like a fortune for their disaster recovery architecture, but too often disaster recovery testing is done infrequently at best. Moreover, DR testing is likely to be disruptive, expensive, and inadequate. So IT administrators cannot feel comfortable about their disaster recovery protection infrastructure.



What do you need to know? The software tool cavalry seems to be riding to the rescue for disaster recovery testing. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery has been around for two years. More recently Continuity Software with RecoverGuard and Illuminator with its Virtual Recovery Engine have entered the disaster recovery management space. (Continuity Software recently briefed me as an industry analyst and Illuminator briefed me earlier in the year.) All of these products help with proactive management for disaster recovery management.



The basic problem is that the replicated disaster recovery data center is not necessarily in synchronization with the production data center. Changes to the production data center are not reflected at the replica data center. Dealing with this problem is the task of disaster recovery management products.



Assured Recovery enables a full recovery test of an enterprise's data on the data protection copy. All operations that are necessary to verify the integrity of the data -- and that includes database updates -- are performed. All this is done without impacting the production environment and without having to perform re-synchronization upon the completion of the test.



RecoverGuard and Virtual Recovery Engine take a different tack. (Continuity Software's RecoverGuard will be illustrated for simplicity, but Illuminator is similar.)



RecoverGuard collects information from servers, storage, and databases. For example, servers tell what kind of storage they connect to and databases tell where they keep their data and what they do for disaster recovery. After the information is collected, it is analyzed. Analysis is performed by business service (i.e., application), such as backup, billing, and customer relationship management. Analysis looks for signatures of problems, which can be called gaps (or exposures). The problem may be something such as lack of data consistency, data corruption, or mis-configuration. For example, a snapshot is supposed to protect data on a particular volume on a regular basis, but, for some reason, it is not doing so. The snapshot may have been mis-configured.

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