Your CIO is likely under intense pressure to reduce TCO (CapEx and OpEx) while improving service levels, managing risks, supporting business growth, and enabling competitiveness. One of the initiatives around managing risks that your CIO may be focused on is business continuity.

If you use or maintain a Disaster Recover (DR) site as part of your business continuity plan, periodically you need to validate your ability to recover your business should a disaster occur. This validation process in many cases is a regulatory, insurance, or auditor requirement. Part of this is due to the confidential nature of the data your business manages, and your business may not survive if your data center is down and you are unable to recover all of the data. However, a DR site requires a substantial investment in people, money and time and you are likely looking for ways to minimize these three cost factors.

In enterprise environments, tape is typically one of the storage tiers used in the management of your data and needs to be included in your DR plans. I have written previously about the benefits of virtual tape in real tape environments but have not focused on it from a DR perspective. I have two basic questions for you on this topic:

Would it be of value to your business if:

• You could validate your real and virtual tape business continuance capability without the need to purchase duplicate hardware and software?
• You had the ability to support a DR test and keep your business running simultaneously without the risk of losing data?

I suspect your answer to both of these questions is “absolutely yes!”

In addition to being able to accomplish the above two feats, what if you had the ability to

• Logically divide your existing production real and virtual hardware and tape volume pools into a production and DR test environment? Allowing you to test your DR configuration while concurrently running production work?
• Keep your data at both your local and remote DR sites in synch during the DR test?
• Conduct your DR test using either local or remote resources, or a combination of local and remote resources?
• Discard all of the data created from the DR test and seamlessly redeploy the logically separated hardware back into your production environment?

I, again, suspect you would like to have these capabilities and more.

Sun has addressed these issues with its Concurrent Disaster Recovery Test option of the VSM virtual tape system. Concurrent Disaster Recovery Test is one of many VSM options on which you can base your disaster recovery plan. VSM provides you with a wide spectrum of DR options and more are on the horizon. If interested, you can get the latest information about VSM