Disaster Recovery is…. Boring!

Let’s face it. Disaster Recovery – at least the portion that IT is involved with – is boring. There’s no dramatic TV footage (we hope!), no flashing lights, no daring helicopter rescues and no one shouting “Clear!” as the patient is shocked back to life… In other words, there is nothing about an IT recovery that is very interesting at all to a majority of the general population.

Unfortunately, this does not help prepare the client or end-user to connect a disaster event with a subsequent IT service outage. “Sure there was a class 5 hurricane, but why doesn’t the damn ATM work?” may be the prevalent attitude. Now, that is not to say that those who experienced the disaster first hand and can actually see damaged infrastructure will share in this perception; but for individuals who reside in a different state and did not experience the event first hand – there is no intuitive reason to link the effect – the IT service outage, with the disaster itself.

So, ‘why doesn’t the damn ATM work?’ The only truly acceptable answer is “it should.”

In general, IT services are perceived as a utility function. And just like any other utility – they are supposed to work. Just as when you ‘throw the switch’ there is an expectation that the light will come on, the ATM, email server, or airline reservation system is just supposed to work. Period.

It is the industry’s realization of this that has been leading the paradigm shift from Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity.

There is simply no such thing as an instantaneous Disaster Recovery event. Business Continuity, on the other hand, is implemented to continue the delivery of critical IT services when the normal IT infrastructure has suffered a catastrophic failure.

Business Continuity announcements from February 26, 2008

On the same day that IBM announced the new z10 processor, there were a couple of other product announcements of interest to the Business Continuity practitioner: GDPS v3.5 was announced along with enhancements to the DS8000. These announcements may have been overlooked by some because of the excitement generated by the processor announcement.

GDPS V3.5

GDPS V3.5 is planned for general availability on March 31, 2008. New functions include:

• Distributed Cluster Management (DCM) - Designed to provide coordinated disaster recovery across System z™ and non-System z servers by integrating with distributed cluster managers. Added integration with Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) via GDPS/PPRC and GDPS/XRC.
• GDPS/PPRC Multiplatform Resiliency for System z expanded to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux™ 4.
• Enhancements to the GDPS GUI.
• Added support for FlashCopy® Space Efficient.
• Improved performance and system management with support for z/OS® Global Mirror Multi-Reader.
• Increased availability with GDPS/MzGM support for z/OS Metro/Global Mirror Incremental Resync

DS8000 (2107)

The new DS8000 functions are currently available. They are delivered via Licensed Machine Code (LMC) update.

• Extended Distance FICON for System z environments - help avoid performance degradation at extended distances and reduce the need for channel extenders in DS8000 z/OS Global Mirror configurations.
• Support for Extended Address Volume (EAV) – Increases the maximum number of cylinders per volume from 65,520 to 262,668 (223 GB of addressable storage).
• Support z/OS Metro/Global Mirror Incremental Resync.

Trademark Legal Info

GDPS, System z, HyperSwap, Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex, DS8000, System Storage, FICON, System z9, HACMP and Tivoli Enterprise are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both.

FlashCopy, z/OS, Tivoli, AIX, NetView, Parallel Sysplex, and zSeries are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both.

Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries or both.

Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

EMC announces mainframe Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product

Last Month EMC announced their entry into the mainframe Virtual Tape Library market:

“EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today extended its industry-leading virtual tape library (VTL) capabilities to customers in mainframe environments with the introduction of the EMC® Disk Library for Mainframe (EMC DLm). Delivering the industry's first 'tapeless' virtual tape system for use in IBM zSeries environments, the EMC DLm enables high-performance disk-based backup and recovery, batch processing and storage and eliminates the challenges associated with traditional tape-based operations to lower customers' data center operating costs.”

“The EMC DLm connects directly to IBM zSeries mainframes using FICON or ESCON channels, and appears to the mainframe operating system as standard IBM tape drives. All tape commands are supported by DLm transparently, enabling customers to utilize their existing work processes and applications without making any modifications. Additionally, the EMC DLm enables asynchronous replication of data over IP networks, extending the benefits of array-based replication to mainframe data protection operations.” [Source: EMC press release]

This is an interesting strategic move by EMC. Not only does it offer EMC entry into a portion of the mainframe storage market where they couldn’t play before, but in the longer term it may also tend to further solidify vendor allegiance in the mainframe storage market as recovery methodologies tend to be somewhat vendor centric.

A “tapeless” implementation of virtual tape is an interesting proposition, but it is not without its own unique constraints. Seeing how Murphy was, and always will be an optimist, it will be interesting to see how “tapeless tape” plays out in the real world.

First of all, a VTL implementation consisting of a disk buffer and no “back-end” physical tape tends to ignore the most attractive cost point of storing data on tape. Namely, that of data being stored – unused – for deep archive or other purposes. Data of this type that eventually resides on physical tape can be stored on the shelf for mere pennies/GB/month. However, if there is no “back-end” physical tape that can be ejected from the VTL, then the unused data must be up and spinning – perhaps forever – at a higher cost per GB/month.

A second consideration is one of capacity. Tape usage in a mainframe environment tends to be somewhat inconsistent. There are the normal cycles of “weekly backups” and “month-end jobs” and the like, but there are also the unplanned events that can use hundreds or thousands of “tapes” without warning.

Is there a mainframe shop that hasn’t run out of tapes in recent history? Even for those mainframe environments that are running VTLs today and never plan to eject the physical tape media... They can eject it should the need arise to add additional capacity on an emergency basis.

These two points are certainly not the most issues to be addressed when evaluating tape solutions. They are merely a couple of additional items to be considered along with cost, performance, availability and other components of the total solution.

Long Live the Mainframe!

In the wake of IBM’s recent announcement for their new generation of mainframe, the Z10 I thought it would be interesting to review some of the other mainframe headlines and related comments of early 2008.

• January 23, 2008 (Techworld/IDG) By Chris Kanaracus Up to three-quarters of an enterprise data is managed or stored on a mainframe. Research by IBM user group SHARE has revealed that the mainframe, which conventional wisdom had said was old technology, is playing a big part in modern enterprise systems...
• January 24, 2008 (ITbusiness.ca) COBOL coders needed again as mainframe projects increase. Mainframe installation projects are growing, but the talent needed to run them is in short supply.
• February 4, 2008 (Computerworld) Palm Beach Community College bought an IBM zSeries mainframe for about a half-million dollars in 2005. Last month, the school agreed to sell it — for $40,000 on eBay.
• February 26, 2008 (WSJ) Young Mainframe Programmers are the Cat’s Meow … Where do businesses find people who remember how to program the things? That’s a question IBM is grappling with, as well. Most computer-science students these days view mainframe programming as the tech equivalent of learning Latin. They’d rather learn Java, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other hot new Web programming languages. So, since 2004, IBM has been trying to get colleges and universities to include mainframe classes in their curriculums. IBM estimates that 50,000 students have sat through a mainframe class since then…
• March 3, 2008 (CBRonline) Hitachi to support IBM zSeries mainframe Services oriented storage applications provider Hitachi Data Systems has announced that it will support the IBM z10 zSeries mainframe, which IBM launched earlier this week. Hitachi said it will certify enterprise system connection, fiber connection, and Fibre Channel connectivity for the zSeries. It will also continue to support the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM operating systems.

Interesting stuff, eh? Contrary to the long held popular opinion, the mainframe is not dead. Mainframe usage continues and it continues to be the platform of choice for many critical application systems

Simple data classification for Business Continuity

The majority of today's businesses cannot survive a catastrophic loss of corporate data. In many cases, the data is the corporations’ most important asset – and the amount of data is growing at exponential rates. This dramatic growth in the enterprise storage environment is forcing businesses to continually examine and enhance the availability, security and reliability of their enterprise storage environment.

Quick Terms
Business Continuity	The ability of an enterprise to continue to function during and after a catastrophic event
HIPAA	Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Resilience	The ability to provide a minimum acceptable level of service during or following following failures
Sarbanes-Oxley	U.S. legislation to protect and preserve financial information

Just as the volume and importance of data for day-to-day business use continues to grow, the requirement to archive data for future use has also grown dramatically. Compliance requirements, like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others have helped to accelerate this growth. Also, new data sources are constantly being developed including the digitization of formerly non-digital (paper) assets, plus the requirement to quickly and accurately retrieve legacy data for business purposes, has contributed to enterprise storage requirements as well.

Businesses recognize that remote data replication, multi-site failover and other techniques along with faster backup and recovery times, are essential to their ability to survive in today’s 24x7 global economy. Several mechanisms are implemented by most businesses to ensure business continuity. These techniques include newer data replication (“mirroring”) processes as well as adaptations to or modifications of some of the more classic Disaster Recovery techniques that have been successfully utilized in the past.

In many cases, the legacy Disaster Recovery methods have served the industry well for many years. These methods continue to be useful, but they are proving to be inadequate as the sole means of providing Business Continuity in today’s world. Business requirements for continuity plans and fault recovery demand greater levels of operational resilience, data protection and business continuance requiring off-site data replication, automatic storage system failover, in addition to shorter backup windows and quicker recovery times.

Luckily, new tools and facilities are constantly being developed to satisfy these requirements.

Before deciding upon which of the newer business continuity facilities might be appropriate in your environment, it is important to try to understand how your data is classified according to business use. While a single solution might seem desirable from a support aspect, it is sometimes not the most cost effective means of satisfying the true business requirements.

Using the broadest terms possible, the recovery requirements of data can be classified as:

1. Immediate – This data is required to support critical business functions.
2. As Soon As Possible –This data is required to support normal business functions.
3. Eventually - This data will probably be used sometime or may need to be available to satisfy legal or archival requirements.

While this list is a vast over-simplification of the complexities involved in data classification, it does illustrate the idea that different data may have different backup and recovery requirements. Once this idea has been accepted, it is possible to target specific data for the appropriate (and most cost effective) backup and recovery methodologies that have been (or can be) implemented in your environment.

Z/Systems Journal Article

I read an interesting article from the Z/Systems Journal titled “Eight Tips for the New Mainframe Storage Manager” by B. Curtis Hall

The article is far too brief to serve as a comprehensive primer for the new storage manager, but the eight tips do include several pearls of wisdom (some obvious and some not so obvious) that should help the newbie storage manager.

One interesting point made by Mr. Hall is that “storage won’t just manage itself.” While this is obvious to many, the complexities involved in proper storage management are sometimes poorly acknowledged by IT management. Recognizing the total cost of storage as a percentage of the total IT budget can sometimes be used to identify it’s level of importance – and the level of focus – that should be given to managing this important resource.

By and large it is the customer data and not the technology that is of primary importance. This is, of course, the client view of the data.

From a service delivery standpoint, however, the technology supporting the storage environment is the most critical aspect of providing access to the client data. Properly managing these technologies and supporting the appropriate levels of Business Resilience, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, backups, etc., is one of the most critical components of today’s IT management team.



Mike Smith
Recovery Specialties, LLC

Mildly Interesting...

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, but a good PSA can be hard to find!

I went looking for some updated web PSAs (Public Service Announcements) to put on the http://www.nasrp.com/ website. I was actually kind of surprised that so few charitable organizations spend the time to make this information available to web sites!

The American Red Cross website has the best selection that I was able to find. The presentation of their PSAs makes it very easy to select their banner ads to be displayed. The American Heart Association also has a fairly large selection of PSAs.

What about other organizations? Not so many. Certainly some organizations that I would like to support do not seem to have any web banner PSAs available.

To any large charitable organization that doesn't offer web PSAs today, I recommend that you take a look at what's available from the American Red Cross to see what you are missing!