Get Ready for DRaaS

A friend of mine is a long-time cloud aficionado. Yesterday I e-mailed him because the guy who lives next to my friend's cottage is a lunatic. The cops spend more time there than standing next to Linday Lohan's driver's side window.

In response he happened to mention possibly starting a DRaaS company.

Putting my thinking cap on (that used to be a tumbler of Scotch) I quickly surmised that to be disaster recovery as a service.

As a Carbonite customer, I been using DRaaS for years -- I just called it Internet backup!

Eric Beehler calls DRaaS Disaster Recovery in the Cloud and he's quite the expert. But Eric's angle is different. He expounds on DR and backup for the cloud, as opposed to using a somewhat anonymous cloud service for DR.

With Beehler's advice, you can understand and plan precisely how your critical cloud data is copied, saved, secured, and replaced in the event the original is compromised. This advice could perhaps be best applied in a private cloud, but could also presumably be used in conjunction with a public cloud service where you take it upon yourself to protect data and apps running on Amazon, RackSpace, etc. This is opposite of a private cloud which spills over into a public cloud when capacity runs out.

There are several options that Beehler's walks through in ascending order.

One point Beehler makes, and it's indeed well taken, is many shops have disk-based backup held off-site for DR and these systems don't always have the most recent data. A little dash of replication software can solve that, allowing you to chose how often point-in-time backups are made.

Mirroring goes a step further, and is akin to continuous replication. Instead of taking stop-action photos of your moving cloud, you take constant high-res video.

Perhaps the ultimate solution is virtualization, where you can run a separate VM of the production app and if the production machine goes down, the VM is already running.

Posted by Doug Barney on 04/24/2012 at 12:47 PM