Bridging The Replication Gap

Some say that replication is expensive and complex.

They are wrong.

November 2010

Prepared for
Disaster recovery is not what it used to be. In the event of a flood or fire, for example,
organisations have restored tape-based backup data from a remote location. This option
is becoming less realistic as time constraints, data volumes and the cost of being offline
continue to grow. Another option is data replication, but this carries its own challenges.
The result is what might be termed a replication gap, in which disaster recovery needs are
moving beyond many organisations’ technical and budgetary capabilities.
Back-up tape is normally transferred manually by courier to a secure site. If the primary
site failed, the back-up data is retrieved and restored manually to new computers
located at a secondary site, or at the primary site after it has been renovated and tapes
delivered. This approach leaves organisations with many problems. The first is security:
there have been embarrassing cases of tapes being lost en route. Tapes are also often
left unencrypted, leading to compliance issues with regulators.
The other problem is long time lapses. The recovery time objective is the time it takes
to restore the backed-up data so that an organisation becomes functional again.
Companies might wait hours or even days for their data to be recovered, losing business
and reputation in the process.
Even more worrying, the recovery may not work at all. Many disaster recovery plans fail to
include sufficient data testing. Are data tapes being written to accurately? How often is
their physical integrity checked? How frequently are data restoration processes checked
and how certain can administrators be that they will work when needed?
Testing the restoration process is a long, complex undertaking that may have to take
place over the weekend, when the business is dormant. For some, the window of business
dormancy is shrinking, or does not exist at all. Many organisations find disaster recovery
testing very difficult, and for some it simply may not happen. How many company
directors are aware of this and have examined a risk matrix to understand the regulatory
and financial implications?

The need for replication

For these reasons smart companies have been moving to a business continuity model in
which disaster recovery is seamlessly integrated into everyday operations. For them, there
is no manual off-line backup and no couriers to lose unencrypted tapes. Instead, high-
speed data links and storage virtualisation have enabled these organisations to replicate
their data between remote sites. Data is always available from several locations, so that
in the event of a physical site failure other copies are available immediately. But they are
committing large volumes of capital expenditure to achieve this replicated environment.
As more companies experience the challenges of an increasingly fast-paced business
world with more data requirements, the need for replication is growing, driven by several
key factors.

Data volume growth

We are producing more data, but we also need near-instant access to a larger
proportion of it than before.
According to a survey of 173 organisations by the Aberdeen Group, the volume of
data produced in the average enterprise is growing at just under 30 per cent a year.
Cisco’s figures suggest a CAGR of about 32 per cent between 2008-2013. It is not just the
volume of data that creates challenges for the business: a growing proportion of the
unstructured data we generate can be seen as mission-critical, as we drive more of our

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business processes and workflow online. Significantly, a report released in October 2010
by the Ponemon Institute in conjunction with Emerson Power found that 51 per cent of
respondents considered every application in the data centre to be mission-critical.
Part of this growth stems from our ability to handle increasingly rich unstructured data
types. Video, for example, is set to make up 40 per cent of consumer internet traffic by the
end of 2010, Cisco believes. Video began with consumers watching streaming multimedia
and conducting video calls but, just as with Web 2.0 services and instant messaging,
video is now moving into the enterprise realm – and the demand for quality is higher.
High-definition video and telepresence services may exponentially drive up data volumes
once again.

The cost of unavailability

With increasingly tight business cycles, just-in-time supply chains and customers’ increasing
intolerance of any delays, companies cannot afford to be off-line as often as before. It
is difficult to estimate the true cost of downtime because it depends on the business’s
dependency on online systems and on other parameters such as the market sector and
the time of year. Toys R Us, for example, would suffer more from downtime in the three
weeks before Christmas than it would in February. But in general, downtime costs are not
getting cheaper, and the cost of lost business is equalled perhaps only by the reputation
cost.

The back-up delta

Organisations backing up data manually off-line risk suffering from the time gap between
the last backup and a disruption in service. In the worst case scenario, a daily tape
backup could leave the company lacking a whole business day of data, adversely
affecting customer service and sales.

The challenge of replication

Replication is becoming a necessary part of any business continuity operation but it
is fraught with difficulty. Moving from a manual operation in which tapes are simply
left outside the door for a courier to pick up to an automated service in which data is
dynamically shifted between cities involves a considerable capital and operational
overhead. This reveals itself in several key areas.

Equipment and facility costs

A company sending tapes to a secure offsite storage facility has only to pay for a single
storage system and a single data centre. A replicated environment changes that situation
significantly. Replicating data between sites also involves replicating both the equipment
and the facilities.
A storage area network (SAN) at one site must be reproduced at the destination
site, which must be conditioned to support data centre operations. Data centres
require cooling equipment, air purifiers and supporting equipment and staff to keep
them running. In an uncertain economy it may be difficult to find the budget for such
investments, especially as senior management will be needed to pull together the IT and
facilities functions.

Complexity
SANs have become more manageable but they are still far from simple. Virtualised

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storage architectures are often incompatible, making it difficult to get storage equipment
working together. In spite of the interoperability issues, many customers find themselves
using storage systems from different vendors, either through a lack of joined up
procurement or perhaps because decision-makers focused on cost savings and chose
the best deal.
This can mean multiple replication links have to be created for multiple systems replicated
at a different location. The more vendors there are in a company’s SAN portfolio, the
higher the potential replication cost.

Management cost
SANs are also expensive to manage and the expense varies according to the type of
technology used. For example, Fibre Channel network administrators need an entirely
different set of skills to those administering conventional Ethernet networks, and those
skills come at a price. Data centre operatives will also be needed to maintain servers and
other equipment in a replicated environment.

Facility dependence
Organisations wishing to reduce these costs do so at the risk of compromising the
availability of their architectures. A company can decide not to replicate its data
remotely, instead relying on locally virtualised storage. It can create another SAN, located
in a separate blade chassis from its primary storage system, for example. This eliminates
the cost of a separate data centre and a high-speed link between those data centres.
But it also limits the effectiveness of its business continuity. If the physical site suffers a
disaster, all data will still be lost.

The replication gap

The problems underpinning replication make it prohibitively expensive for many
companies, although the pull of this technology is stronger than ever. According
to Storage Magazine’s October 2010 survey of storage spending in the US, remote
replication is a key area of investment for disaster recovery and became more popular
than off-site tape storage a couple of years ago.
In 2010, 48 per cent of companies favoured remote replication, compared with 28 per
cent who favoured off-site tape storage; 39 per cent of respondents said that they would
increase spending for remote replication technologies in 2010. The replication gap is
narrowing. Only 16 per cent of companies (the lowest number Storage Magazine has
seen) don’t have remote replication technology in their disaster recovery plans for 2010.
Such figures are telling, but also hide information about the type of replication that is
taking place. For example, some companies will replicate only small parts of their data
sets, perhaps focusing on critical data such as customer orders. They may overlook their
increasing reliance on IT systems, such as email for example.
The cost of effective remote replication will deter many organisations from rolling it out
systematically across all of these data sets. Although storage budgets are creeping up
again slowly after the financial crisis, it is a lengthy process. Storage budgets grew 0.6 per
cent between spring and autumn 2010, after dipping below zero at the turn of 2009; at
their pre-recession peak, in the autumn of 2006, storage budgets were growing at 5.2 per
cent. Clearly, companies are still hurting and even if they are interested in investing in
remote replication, many will do it tentatively.

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It is also worth noting that smaller companies are the hardest hit by financial constraints.
While enterprise and mid-sized companies both experienced growth in storage budgets,
smaller companies saw their budgets drop by 0.6 per cent.

Replication as a Service
Cloud-based services have been floated as a potential solution for almost every
computing problem. Companies offer software applications, security, storage and even
entire programmable platforms using public virtualised computing infrastructures. In all the
discussion about the use of public cloud architectures for application delivery, customers
worry whether applications will be truly fit for purpose and customisable.
While cloud infrastructure may not be suitable for some services, it is perfect for remotely
replicating data. SunGard’s Replication as a Service (RaaS) offers companies that might
not otherwise be able to afford it a way to enter the game. It also offers those who are
replicating small subsets of data the chance to do it properly, replicating all of the data
that they truly need to. RaaS provides several key advantages over traditional DIY remote
replication.

Vendor independence
Whereas a DIY replication system would have to set up separate replication links between
SANs from different vendors, a specialist RaaS system is heterogeneous and designed to
connect with a variety of different vendors’ storage systems. This dramatically lowers the
cost because IT departments do not have to duplicate every single SAN.

Manageability
In a self-built remote replication environment, the IT department might be forced to
manipulate data so that mission-critical information to be replicated is all stored on a
subset of SANs. This would enable the IT department to avoid replicating the entire multi-
vendor SAN infrastructure. However, it would introduce a management overhead.

Represents an operating expense

Buying the additional hardware necessary to build a remote replication system in-house
increases capital expenditure and obliges the IT department to put more assets on the
balance sheet. Using a cloud-based service enables customers to classify replication as
an operational expense in the budget. This is significant in an economic climate where
project sponsors will want to avoid “lumpy” capital expenditure, instead of a smoother,
more regular operational expense. It makes for better planning, which in turn makes
the IT department more accountable. It also frees up capital expenditure for revenue-
generating projects.

Service level flexibility

Maintaining service levels in DIY replication environments is difficult enough. Building in the
option to alter those service levels as required may be beyond the competency of many
in-house IT departments. A specialist RaaS solution can be configured to dial-in the service
level needed. Failover speed can be factored into the monthly price.

Pay-as-you-grow
One of the most attractive aspects of cloud services is known as “option value”. With
traditional capital expenditure, you are stuck with the equipment you buy. Unless you
continue using it to the full, it becomes a dead asset that will take years to depreciate on

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the balance sheet. That could be a problem if, for example, you deploy deduplication
technology after your replication solution. Moreover, if you need a higher level of
service, you must go back to decision-makers to obtain approval for yet another capital
purchase.
RaaS enables you to scale up (and down) the level of storage required at the replicated
site in relatively small increments of 500GB. Snapshots, too, can be scaled to fit growing
needs.

Fully managed replication

The last thing an IT department wants to worry about is human resources. Finding the skills
to manage the replication process can be problematic. Do you increase the workload
of existing staff and rely on them never to be sick, or do you hire a dedicated member of
staff and risk under-using them? RaaS includes 24 x 7 management of the process from a
remote location so customers know their data is always in good hands.

SunGard’s RaaS solution

SunGard delivers RaaS: a solution that replicates customer SAN data into its own
enterprise-class private cloud-based storage infrastructure. Designed to be used in ½Tb
increments and therefore suitable for any size of organisation, it is also a fully managed
service.
SunGard’s RaaS is constantly replicating changes in the data and takes snapshots of
the entire customer file system at preset points in time. In the event of a disaster at the
customer site, SunGard can make its replicated data live, turning its cloud-based system
into the primary site for the customer’s traffic. This gives the customer the chance to get
its own data centre up and running or find an alternative site in which to restore its own
operations before SunGard switches the flow of data back to the customer’s systems.
SunGard installs its Replication Core equipment at the customer site. The data to be
replicated is configured, along with the service level required by the user. The Replication
Core connects to the customer’s central switch and is used to coordinate replication with
SunGard’s cloud infrastructure.
Two connections are established between the customer site and the Replication Core.
The first is a 1Gbit leased line that is used to carry the replicated data. The second is a
PSTN connection used by SunGard’s monitoring and management team.
The 1Gbit leased line connects to Replication Core equipment at the SunGard site. This in
turn connects to the company’s switching fabric and into a shared SAN. Based in the UK,
the SAN uses a virtualised infrastructure to logically separate customers’ data for security
reasons.

Testing disaster recovery

For many administrators setting up disaster recovery services, testing is imperative. The
RaaS service gives customers two options for testing data, both of which use snapshots
of replicated data to avoid any performance or reliability issues with the live replication
process.
The first option provides the customer with a dedicated segment of the SunGard shared
SAN designed purely to store a snapshot of live data to be used for testing purposes.
The second uses a shared space, which must be booked for use during a customer
testing process. Customers can also opt out of snapshot services altogether, effectively

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eliminating the testing procedure.
SunGard’s RaaS solution can also be used to reduce the recovery time objective when
used in conjunction with SunGard’s own disaster recovery solution. Using an end-to-end
RaaS and disaster recovery solution from SunGard can also help to reduce the recovery
point objective, which is the time difference between live data at the customer site and
data replicated at a remote location.

Conclusion
The sluggish recovery in storage budgets is helping to sustain the replication gap. A
significant proportion of companies are still not exploring replication as an option, in spite
of the general need for higher data volumes and faster recovery times. Those that are
exploring this option face issues such as the balkanisation of corporate storage. Until the
day that vendors suddenly agree that competitive advantage is a bad thing and decide
to work with each other to make their systems entirely interoperable, this problem will
continue.
There is a similar gap surrounding the concept of public share computing overall. Hype
and promise among advocates of cloud computing is at an all-time high but many
companies still feel nervous about the concept. The gap between promise and execution
still has to be closed. One way to narrow that gap is to ask what cloud computing services
are available today that could bring substantial benefits to IT operations. SunGard’s RaaS
is among the top answers.

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About The Register
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About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services’ mission is to help customers
prepare for and recover from emergencies by helping
them minimalise their computer downtime and optimise
their uptime, despite situations that threaten to interrupt
their business.
More than 10,000 customers worldwide rely on SunGard Availability Services to achieve
uninterrupted access to the information systems they need to do business. Trust us to do
the same for you.
Tel: 0800 143 413
Email: infoavail@sungard.com
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