How to build a disaster recovery plan and enable business continuity with Veeam

Here’s a true story from one of our customers. A gas explosion resulted in a major power failure downtown, which in turn left the company’s primary data center offline for a week. This is a classic example of an IT Disaster – unexpected and unpredictable, disrupting business continuity and affecting Always-On operations. We can only imagine how much it could cost that company to stay offline for a week (as much as losing their business, I’d say), if they didn’t have a reliable disaster recovery (DR) plan and an Availability solution to execute this plan.

A solid Disaster Recovery plan makes your company resilient to IT disruptions and able to restore your services in case of disaster with minimal to no impact on users and business operations. It’s not just making regular backups, but a complex IT infrastructure assessment and documenting (including hardware, software, networks, power and facilities), business impact analysis of applications and workloads and planning on staff, roles and risk assessment. And above all, there’s an essential testing and exercising of your disaster recovery plan. If you don’t test, how would you know that it works as expected?

Unlike physical infrastructures with all their complexity, virtualization gives more flexibility in management and processes allowing you to do more with less. For virtualized data centers, Veeam delivers joint capabilities of enabling data Availability and infrastructure management. By using Veeam Availability Suite, you cover multiple points in your Disaster Recovery plan at once and get:

  • Offsite replication with traffic optimization and advanced capabilities
  • Easier disaster recovery orchestration and recovery testing
  • Infrastructure assessment and documentation
  • Capacity planning and “What if” modelling
  • Backup and virtual infrastructures monitoring and reporting

These also address compliance audit needs by providing you with up-to-date information on backed-up workloads, backups reliability and actual data recovery time versus your SLAs. If staying compliant and ready for audits is important for you, I recommend you read the new white paper by Hannes Kasparick,  Mastering compliance, audits and disaster recovery planning with Veeam.

Replication as a core disaster recovery technology

Disaster Recovery  planning includes defining the lowest possible RTO to minimize the disruption of business operations. In terms of ability to restore failed operations in minutes, replication mechanism wins the game allowing you to instantly switch the failed workload to its ready-to-use “clone” to get the lowest-possible RTO. For DR purposes, standby replicas of production VMs are stored on a remote secondary site or in the cloud. Even if the production site goes down, like in my example with a major power failure, a remote site remains unaffected by the disaster and can take the load.

In the near future, Veeam will release a new solution for scalable, flexible and easier-to-use disaster recovery planning and orchestration – Veeam Availability Orchestrator. This new product will support disaster recovery scenarios for many VMs at multiple locations and provide automated, template-based documentation to meet compliance requirements. If you want to be the first to test it, register now to know when  Veeam Availability Orchestrator is GA or to test the Beta right now!

Test your Disaster Recovery plan!

All data security and management standards (ISO family is not an exception) imply Disaster Recovery plan testing as a mandatory exercise. You can never know if everything will work as expected in cases of real disasters until you try it and run the planned procedures in advance. DR simulation will also allow you to ensure that your personnel are well-prepared for extreme IT situations and everyone mentioned in your DR plan is aware of the activities they need to perform. If you discover any drawbacks during DR testing – either human or software-related – you’ll have a good chance to fix your Disaster Recovery plan accordingly and thus potentially avoid serious disruptions in your business continuity.

Automated recovery verification for backups and replica restore points built in Veeam Backup & Replication (for no additional fees!) will save you much time and additional resources for testing. SureReplica allows to boot replicated VMs (VMware only for v9) to the necessary restore point in an isolated Virtual Lab and automatically perform heartbeat, ping and application tests against them. Also, you have an option to run your own customized tests – all without any impact on your production.

Final word

Disaster recovery planning is not just another bureaucracy, but a set of measures to maintain an organization’s business continuity. Built in compliance with international regulations and standards, a Disaster Recovery plan gives your customers a high level of confidence in your non-stop services, data security and Availability. Veeam helps you to stay compliant with both internal and external IT regulations, be ready for audit and be able to restore any system or data in minutes.

See also

Veeam Community Forums: Disaster Recovery Plan template

Veeam Blog: 3-2-1 Backup Rule

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