Hosted Disaster Recovery Services
While computing and networking equipment has become more reliable and available around the world, and our data centres more secure, the advent of disaster events has increased with cyclones, typhoons and heavy rainfall more noticeable. In addition, earthquakes have occurred in regions that have not seen disturbances in centuries. Moreover, civil disturbance has also increased even in westernised countries. Our customers are therefore taking more care with their Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DR Services). BlueCentral specialised in platform services and DR services in separate cities specifically to support our clients with mission critical hosting needs.
Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity Planning or BCP preparation does not have to be particularly sophisticated to be effective. Many good BCP plans are written on a page or two. They include a review of which systems and processes are critical for a particular customer, and an analysis of how long a computer system can be "off air" before the business is adversely affected. This leads to an assessment of RPO and RTO - Restore Point and Restore Time for key data, plus a list of systems affected. We can assist our clients with this assessment. Depending on the RTO required, we can recommend DR options at all time and price points.
DR Services - More than Just Hosted Back-Up
Disaster Recovery is about Recovery. In the best case its about Managed DR. Its a lot more than just taking a tape back-up. At BlueCentral, we use tape largely for archive, and extra disk or SAN storage for true backup because it offers multiple benefits to our customers;
- The copy is held on reliable media
- The back-up window is reduced due to the copy being made in a quicker write time.
- Restoration of data can be made directly from SAN disk to new servers or a new virtual server.
- Tape services can then be used to make weekly or monthly archive copies to be taken off-site and stored for longer periods, particularly for audit purposes.
Disaster Recovery at a Second Site Data Center
By far the best solution, and one which is supplied by BlueCentral and very few other hosters, is to run the data to a second full data centre in another State. In our case, we host in two Tier 1 data centres in Melbourne and Sydney, and provide a high speed private link between these locations for our customers use for data replication using Double Take or similar software. The new version of Microsoft Windows Server R8 will enable this further.
Today, we have clients who run hosted VMs in Melbourne for example with manual fail-over hosting services as needed, that can usually be restored in less than 4 minutes. These active-passive services are also very cost effective, as they do not need full Global Load Balanced services initially.
De-Duplication and Data Replication using Hosted EMC Avamar
For customers with very large volumes of data to be stored, we offer a de-duplication service which includes hosted storage of the de-duped data in an alternate location. This technology from EMC is quite superb and commonly utilised by our clients with large print files or requiring hosted multi-media, film or images. De-duplication can be effective up to 85% or 90% of the original data volume and readily "re-hydrated" to the new hosting environment.
For more information about Hosted, Managed DR and Back-up Services contact us on 1300 258 323 or complete the enquiry form to your right and one of our service consultants will contact you shortly.