They may not think so, but many Australian businesses are critically under-prepared for a disaster. Developments in disaster recovery are opening up markets for channel players who can provide customers with the resilience and ability to recover that they need in the face of a calamity.
Australia's small to medium businesses have an unwarranted confidence that they're prepared for a disaster, according to Symantec's 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey. The average SMB has had three outages within the past year through incidents such as power failures, virus or hacker attacks and accidental data loss.
Ninety-three percent of respondents in Australia and New Zealand are somewhat/very satisfied with their disaster recovery plans, even though 30 percent have no plans in place to deal with such disruptions, the survey found. Only one-third of businesses surveyed back up their data daily, and half would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire. Should disaster strike, a quarter of those businesses surveyed concede it would probably drive their customers into the arms of their competitors.
Figures vary, but it's clear a significant number of businesses hit by a disaster never open their doors again, or fail within several years. From the channel's perspective, it's not good for business to have your customers go out of business.
Of most interest to the channel is that the Symantec survey found around 90 percent of companies that did not have a disaster plan said they would introduce one within the next six months.
IT-based disaster recovery might help customers get their essential systems back online in a hurry, but it also offers channel partners the opportunity to talk about wider business continuity planning.
It's easy to forget how vulnerable a modern business is to external forces. What would your customers do if their premises lost power, water or gas? What if a virus, human error or act of sabotage took down their IT systems or telecommunications? It only takes one slip with a jackhammer and an entire city block could be without essential services for a week.
When we talk about disasters, we're not just talking about fire, flood and pestilence of biblical proportions. What would your customers do if they just couldn't access their business premises for a few hours - or a few days?
Fire and flood are obvious risks, but anything from a chemical spill or virus outbreak to an accident or a serious crime could see staff left standing on the footpath. What if it was the staff that was unavailable? A flu epidemic could keep them housebound for a week, or a union dispute could see them walk off the job. Perhaps a transport strike or petrol shortage could see them unable to make their daily commute to the office.
None of these scenarios is unrealistic and all of them are beyond our control. The odds of any one of them happening might be low, but when you combine all the potential threats the risk becomes significant - and that's before you take into account the really unlikely events such as natural disaster or social unrest. The channel shouldn't wait until its customers suffer from a disaster before discussing disaster recovery with them.
"Disaster recovery is really an insurance policy against an event you hope is never going to happen," says Intelligent Business Research Services analyst Kevin McIsaac.
"It's not very popular because, like a lot of insurance policies, disaster recovery is only valuable when the disaster strikes. So in my experience most people are under-prepared for disasters, particularly smaller organisations.
"They either don't have a disaster recovery plan in place at all, or they don't have sufficient data recovery in place and they haven't really gone and tested their disaster recovery plans."
Let's get unphysical
Virtualisation on Intel-based hardware is "the best thing that's happened to disaster recovery in the last 20 years", McIsaac says.
"Virtualisation actually solves a bundle of problems simultaneously. Most people I speak to about virtualisation tend to fixate on the cost savings that come from consolidation. Once you've rolled out virtualisation then aspects such as high availability, disaster recovery and rapid provisioning are the real benefits.
"They give the business real value and you don't really have to pay for them because the consolidation aspect pays for the whole thing," McIsaac says.
"In terms of disaster recovery, virtualisation makes it simpler and much faster. One benefit is that you can easily utilise hardware at other sites as the hardware doesn't have to be exactly the same - and that's a big deal.
"Equally importantly, it doesn't matter if your production servers are physical or virtual. Nor does it matter if your recovery environment is a physical or virtual machine. When disaster strikes it's easy to rebuild servers on the fly, in any location and any environment."
While virtualisation has a lot to offer in terms of disaster recovery, it presents both challenges and opportunities. Many organisations have embraced virtualisation for the cost benefits while giving little thought to disaster recovery for their virtual environment.
A third of Australian and New Zealand organisations do not test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery initiatives, according to Symantec's disaster preparedness survey. Additionally, around a third of the data on virtualised systems are not regularly backed up. Over half of the respondents cited the lack of backup storage capacity and automated recovery tools as top challenges to protecting data in virtual environments.
When businesses approach virtualisation with disaster recovery in mind, it actually takes a lot of the pain out of testing their disaster recovery systems, McIsaac says.
"The great thing about building your disaster recovery plans around virtualisation is that you can easily enact your disaster recovery plans in a virtual environment. It thinks it's a live production machine during testing, but the truth is it's locked down and contained inside its own environment," he says.
"Another benefit of virtualisation is that it's much easier to replicate the current versions of your production systems, because they can be spun up virtually from up-to-date images. In a purely physical environment, there's a lot more work involved in ensuring recent changes to your production environment are reflected in your backup environment."
Symantec's disaster preparedness survey paints a grim picture for many SMBs should disaster strike.As such, it's clear disaster recovery offers excellent growth opportunities for channel partners looking to strengthen their relationship with customers, says Paul Lancaster, Symantec's director of systems engineering for Australia and New Zealand.
"The average cost of downtime for enterprise is $500,000 per incident. Even for SMBs we're talking about $15,000 to $30,000 per incident," Lancaster says. "Clearly there is a lot of work to be done in terms of disaster recovery awareness and preparedness. When you consider the costs of downtime as well as the benefits of virtualisation and the flexibility it brings, the channel has a very compelling disaster recovery story to sell.
"In our surveys, we found 25 percent of all disaster recovery tests have failed - mainly a mixture of human error and hardware failure. As such we strongly recommend SMB customers engage a trusted adviser when it comes to areas such as disaster recovery. It's a great area for channel partners to get involved with because it ties in with a lot of aspects of a customer's business, from virtualisation and high availability to security.
"It's the next step up from purely selling licences or selling hardware - we're talking about consulting services, implementation planning and perhaps even hosting the customer's data and monitoring their security and storage."
Acronis national sales manager Simon Howe agrees that disaster recovery offers channel partners the opportunity to open up new dialogues with customers. "The general discussion with customers is around data availability - their mindset seems to be more focused on ensuring uptime rather than recovering from downtime. Of course such a conversation can lead to best practices around backup, data recovery and disaster recovery," Howe says.
"Once the conversation turns to disaster recovery, everything is happening around virtualisation, deduplication, cloud computing and the flexibility of storage. These aspects are facilitating better disaster recovery processes and allowing SMBs to approach disaster recovery more strategically."
Both Acronis' Howe and Symantec's Lancaster agree disaster recovery systems can benefit from the improvements in data deduplication - significantly reducing backup sizes by ensuring the same file isn't backed up multiple times.
This year's model
Virtualisation is starting to make an impact in the disaster recovery space. Every disaster recovery project undertaken by mid-market service provider Brennan IT in the past six months has been predominantly based on virtualisation, says managing director David Stevens.
"Our entry-level solution is that we replace physical servers with virtual servers in one of our data centres. Combined with that is either live data replication or very close to live," Stevens says.
"For a minimal monthly outlay they get access to a whole bunch of virtual servers, and then the pricing changes if they need to enact the disaster recovery plan. It's a much better use of money and resources than buying a lot of extra hardware and having it sitting idle in a data centre somewhere. A lot of our clients have been so impressed with how the virtualisation side of things works that they've switched their core business apps over to virtualisation as well."
When it comes to disaster recovery, the size of an organisation isn't as important as how critical its data is.
"It's really about how quickly a customer needs to be able to access that data. Financial records are of particular importance and compliance regulations are still really driving a lot of the disaster recovery projects out there," Stevens says.
"If you're in a financial services role then disaster recovery becomes important even if you're a one- or two-person company."
Brennan IT's cloud computing reseller program lowers the barriers to entry for channel players looking to offer enterprise-grade disaster recovery, says Nick McMenemy, Brennan IT's head of marketing and product management.
"We have a range of commercial models, from the basic referral to a full white label "provider-in-a-box" solution. There's been a lot of interest from the traditional reseller community in branding their own flavour of service, but it's taking time to filter through because there's obviously a degree of awareness and learning required," McMenemy says.
"It's a very interesting proposition for the channel when you consider the alternative of doing it yourself from scratch - the capex outlay, the rackspace and connectivity, the management overheads and the need for new skills.
"Then they've got to provide a reasonable service-level agreement and a helpdesk. Or they come to us and we do it all for them, on a pay-per-use basis. That's a model that translates very readily into the channel."
Virtualisation is revolutionising the disaster recovery market for the channel by enabling new services that are affordable for smaller organisations, says Leonard Chan, future technologies manager with Macquarie Hosting.
The cost savings and flexibility associated with virtualisation are allowing SMBs to switch from the traditional "primary and backup" disaster recovery model to a "dual production" model. This allows customers to achieve a higher level of availability.
"A lot of customers already use ‘active/active' virtualisation in their production environment. It's not often we come across a pure physical server play these days. Typically a customer may have all their active servers running in one facility and when anything happens things are transferred across to the secondary facility," Chan says.
"The trend is now towards dual production servers, so they continually distribute the load between servers and data centres so you don't put all your eggs in one basket. This is part of a shift from disaster recovery being a reactive implementation to making it more proactive. And the key to this is virtualisation. The fact is that when you use technologies like virtualisation it really makes disaster recovery much simpler and easier to enact."
The biggest hindrance to the dual production model is not the hardware or the services but the high-speed data link required between two active servers in two separate data centres.
"Fat pipes can be cost prohibitive for SMBs, but we can tweak the interaction between dual production servers to reduce bandwidth requirements," Chan says.
"Obviously this is yet another area where the National Broadband Network is going to level the playing field, so customers even at the small end of town can still afford all the services the big players enjoy, but without the capital expense. The NBN will mean big things for SMBs and the disaster recovery space."
Along with bandwidth, storage is a key component when it comes to disaster recovery systems. Just as with servers, the storage space is also reaping the benefits of virtualisation, says Scott Morris, director of partner sales with storage vendor NetApp.
"Right now I'd say business mobility and agility are pushing virtualisation more than disaster recovery," says Morris.
"At the moment people seem to be more interested in how to get more from less but, when you sit down and look at it, improved disaster recovery is one of the true benefits of a virtualised environment.
"You can spin up virtual servers from backups, and virtual storage is no different. As fast as you can bring up servers we can virtualise storage - we call it thin provisioning and it can be a real boost to a disaster recovery plan.
"Virtualisation can be a risk because you're combining separate physical servers into one system, generally with network-based storage such as a NAS or SAN device," says Morris.
"This means the impact of a single failure can be greater, unless you put some other protection mechanisms in place. That's really where we're seeing a massive groundswell of opportunity, as all of those resilience factors that we've built into our platforms tie very strongly into virtualisation and disaster recovery."
Racked with opportunity
Advanced disaster recovery systems which involve synchronous data replication between sites obviously rely on fat pipes, but the load can be reduced by falling back to semi-synchronous data replication - running every hour or every day rather than every keystroke. Site-level high availability technologies can also significantly improve basic disaster recovery plans.
"There are obvious benefits to handling disaster recovery in the cloud, but I don't think many customers appreciate site-level technologies such as snapshots. This lets you easily return a server to the last known good state without having to resort to a tape or online backup," Morris says.
"Another site-level technology of interest is RAID. Employing RAID technology involves spreading data across multiple hard drives to protect against drive failure, but many customers don't appreciate the limitations of common configurations such as RAID 5.
"The weakness of RAID 5 is that it only protects you against one hard drive failure, then you need to swap out that drive and rebuild the RAID. Rebuilding the RAID could take up to 12 hours if you're using 500GB drives. Meanwhile you're at risk of data loss should a second drive fail. Alternatives such as RAID Dual Parity offer an extra level of protection."
The flexibility of virtualisation-based disaster recovery processes is enabling a new breed of dynamic disaster recovery services, says Viktor Babkov, managing director of Business Continuity Asia Pacific (BCAP).
BCAP is the sole Australian distributor of Double-Take software, which is designed to offer real-time backup and automatic failover capabilities for physical and virtual servers regardless of the hardware or software.
"Virtualisation is a great enabler of disaster recovery, allowing rapid scalability of needed resources on demand," Babkov says.
"We can move existing infrastructures into the cloud, we can set up non-intrusive mirrors on applications. We can marry an existing data centre infrastructure with existing infrastructure on the premises.
"There's so much that can be done, but SMBs in particular often don't appreciate this flexibility. This is where the channel can step in to educate them about the potential of these new technologies and thus open up new markets."
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