Why Scalability Matters for Disaster Recovery Solutions
Disaster recovery (DR) is a key tool for ensuring business continuity in the face of data or server environment loss.
With an effective DR solution in place, businesses can quickly recover from many different emergencies, from user errors that delete mission-critical information and applications, to ransomware attacks that corrupt entire databases.
One crucial element that many businesses may overlook in their DR solution is scalability.
Why Scalability Matters for DR
Businesses change over time. As businesses change, so do their computing and data storage needs, which directly affects disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery strategies that rely on the deployment of proprietary hardware to store replicated data add complexity to the management of a DR solution. Additionally, as your replication needs grow, new hardware will need to be added as well.
Proprietary, non-scalable solutions increase management complexity and costs for a business DR strategy over time. Also, a lack of scalability can make deploying the solution to new computing environments more difficult, creating gaps in the DR solution’s coverage of a business’ infrastructure.
Scalable, hardware-agnostic DR solutions increase flexibility and grow with a business’ needs without the need for additional, costly proprietary hardware. This helps to reduce costs and ensure that the solution can be deployed to all of a business’ mission-critical computing environments.
Creating a Scalable Disaster Recovery Solution
To create a truly scalable disaster recovery solution, the solution must:
- Be Hardware Agnostic. A hardware-agnostic DR solution can replicate data from a virtual machine to a DR Target so long as the underlying hypervisors are compatible. This allows businesses to take the complexity out of DR.
- Work on an Individual Virtual Machine Level. The ability to target and replicate individual virtual machines (VMs) rather than entire logical unit numbers (LUNs) is a must for scalability, especially on modern, high-efficiency computing environments that use virtualization. This helps to reduce overall storage and network requirements.
- Enable Simplistic Management. Over time, business computing needs can grow to the point where a single business is running dozens or hundreds of individual VMs for all of their different applications and databases. If the DR solution is too complex, it can turn managing recovery operations for all of the company’s servers and VMs too difficult to be effective.
With a scalable DR solution, businesses can ensure that their recovery needs are met both now and in the future, without creating a massive resource drain to do so.
