ITMS Ltd are pleased to present an overview of their technical disaster recovery service.

This service is a scalable solution suitable for an infrastructure consisting of one server and five workstations, through to large data centre operations. The nature of this therefore dictates that it is a bespoke solution, individually adapted to each client’s needs, however based on the same design blueprint.

This design has been adapted from the highly available and resilient solutions that the likes of LCH (London) utilise on a daily basis.

The basic building blocks that enable this to be cost effective for any organisation are:

• Storage and Storage Replication – our design is flexible so that it can be scaled from bespoke storage based on industry standard hardware and industry established software, through to dedicated Storage Area Network solutions.
• Virtualisation – a key enabler of our design is the use of virtualisation. We work with you to analyse your server infrastructure and migrate it to a virtualised environment, thereby removing any dependency on particular hardware, and also optimising your use of physical hardware at your primary site.
• Remote Desktop – By utilising thin client technologies we pre-build the standard desktop environment for simple and rapid deployment at the disaster recovery location.
• Bandwidth – We analyse the replication needs of your infrastructure to ensure that the replication of your data between your primary site and your backup site happens in a timely fashion. By utilising our close relationships with local providers Sapphire and Gibtelecom we implement the most cost effective bandwidth between your primary site and the(our) disaster recovery centre.

Virtualisation

Optimise how you deploy server and storage resources to help increase responsiveness, enable lower costs and help improve business continuity.

Small businesses face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. Small businesses often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a “do more with less” mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.

Virtualization technology helps simplify server operations

Virtualization allows you to run multiple applications and operating systems independently on a single server. Administrators can quickly move workloads from one virtual workspace to another - easily prioritising business needs while maximizing server resources.

Flexibility in the allocation of computing capacity allows the consolidation of applications and servers - easing IT management requirements and expenses.

Virtualization delivers quantifiable results

In addition to operational efficiencies, our virtualization solutions can help you streamline test and development environments while providing an affordable business continuity strategy.

Scale Your Capabilities Without Scaling Your Costs

ITMS’s virtualization solutions are helping customers to reduce the costs of IT growth, and to accelerate the responsiveness of their IT organization to their business’s needs. Many ITMS customers are already implementing server consolidation strategies to reduce costs related to server hardware acquisition and management, power & cooling and data centre real estate. While cost reduction is often the starting point, the benefits extend well beyond TCO.

Virtualization can help you speed development cycles and deploy new resources faster. Using advanced features, like live migration and VMware’s HA and Site Recovery Manager, you can implement easier to manage and more cost effective high availability and disaster recovery strategies. Virtualization is one of the foundational elements of an automated, agile infrastructure.

Storage and Storage Replication

A storage replication service is a managed service in which stored or archived data is duplicated in real time over a storage area network (SAN).

A storage replication service provides an extra measure of redundancy that can be invaluable if the main storage backup system fails. Immediate access to the replicated data minimizes downtime and its associated costs. The service, if properly implemented, can streamline disaster recovery processes by generating duplicate copies of all backed-up files on a continuous basis. It can also speed up and simplify recovery from a natural or human-caused disaster such as a fire, flood, hurricane, virus, or worm.

Remote Desktop

Remote Desktop Services, formerly known as Terminal Services, is one of the components of Microsoft Windows (both server and client versions) that allows a user to access applications and data on a remote computer over a network. Terminal Services is Microsoft’s implementation of thin-client terminal server computing, where Windows applications, or even the entire desktop of the computer running terminal services, are made accessible to a remote client machine. The client can either be a fully-fledged computer, running any operating system as long as the terminal services protocol is supported, or a barebone machine powerful enough to support the protocol. With terminal services, only the user interface of an application is presented at the client. Any input to it is redirected over the network to the server, where all application execution takes place.

This gives us the ability to pre-build all the desktop applications that you need to use at the disaster recovery location, thereby cutting the recovery time at the disaster recovery centre substantially.

How This All Works Together

By replicating the underlying storage associated with the Virtual Machines in real-time you can be assured that your server infrastructure is safely secured offsite in the event that a disaster strikes. This of course does not replace your backup cycles, as accidental data losses or corruptions would be pushed to the disaster recovery location.

Simplistically, in the event of a disaster the remote storage is made active, the remote Virtual Servers directed to the remote storage and the Virtual Machines restarted.

The remote desktop server(s) are brought online giving you a fully functional network, as it was when the disaster struck.

Of course there are a few more complexities than this that are taken into consideration. Much of the success in this comes during the planning stage at the beginning of the project. As stated before, each customer has very specific infrastructure that enables them to work the way they need to.

ITMS consultants spend the early days of the implementation analysing your systems and connectivity to the outside world, and the outside world to you. We develop an implementation plan than consist of some or all of the following steps:

• Shared Storage Implementation
• Virtualisation of Existing Infrastructure
• Development of Remote Desktop environment for standardised desktop
• Implementation of replication storage
• Analysis of Replication Traffic and sizing of disaster recovery link
• Development of procedures for switch over/switch back
• Truck based Replication
• Monitoring

If you have any further questions, or wish to discuss this in more detail with one of our consultants, please contact us on info@itmsltd.net to arrange a face to face meeting.