Disaster Recovery Testing Doesn't Have to be a Disaster

CA XOsoft™ Assured Recovery is a breakthrough technology that makes your disaster recovery investment truly complete by enabling you to conduct comprehensive and regular tests of your disaster recovery standby servers without any disruption to your production servers or any interruption to your disaster recovery protection. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery testing solutions can be paired with CA XOsoft Replication (formerly CA XOsoft WANSync) or CA XOsoft High Availability (formerly CA XOsoft WANSyncHA), and tailored solutions are available for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and IIS web servers, as well as Oracle database servers.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery is a technology that allows you to perform a real test of your disaster recovery server by actually running the application, even modifying data, without impacting your production environment in any way. In fact, CA XOsoft Assured Recovery offers this functionality without ever leaving your production systems vulnerable during testing, without disrupting production application availability in any way, and without the need for expensive data resynchronization after testing is complete.

At the same time, CA XOsoft Assured Recovery allows you to perform a backup or snapshot of the validated data directly on your disaster recovery server, a tremendously cost-effective way to obtain offsite or consolidated backups and snapshots of your mission critical application data.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery can perform either automatic or automated user initiated "push-button" disaster recovery test without interrupting your production environment, thereby validating the recoverability of your mission-critical data.

Download a trial evaluation of the production version of CA XOsoft Assured Recovery.

An Untested Solution is No Solution

Why is this important?

You've secured your organization's most critical assets by implementing a disaster recovery solution. Although you thoroughly tested and verified this solution during implementation, your environment will have changed over time and may have altered the state of your systems. These include changing server configurations, altered network setups, virus infections and hardware failures. Any gap in time since the last disaster recovery test conducted will amount to a growing gap in assurance that your disaster recovery system will work as planned. What's the only way to close this gap? Regular disaster recovery tests.

To ensure the integrity and effectiveness of your disaster recovery capability in the face of such constant changes, it's not just sensible, but critical to conduct regular disaster recovery tests. In fact, no disaster recovery solution is complete without frequent disaster recovery testing.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery Disaster Recovery Testing Solution

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery is a unique cost-effective solution that integrates several technologies to provide non-disruptive disaster recovery and business continuity testing of your mission-critical servers as often as you like, even as often as several times a day. At no point during testing is your production server affected, nor is disaster recovery protection interrupted in any way.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery provides:

• Normal operation offers fully automated testing of the recoverability of your disaster recovery replica application and data on a scheduled basis or at the push of a button.
• Push-button setup and restore for user initiated testing procedures
• Tests can even modify application data without impact on disaster recovery protection
• Fully customizable test procedures via script registration
• Integrated triggering and management of Microsoft VSS snapshots on Windows Server 2003
• Support for integrating online or offline backups or snapshots
• Tailored support for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Microsoft IIS, and Oracle

[Start Animation]See an animated example of how CA XOsoft Assured Recovery's disaster recovery test solution works.

Other Resources

Learn more about our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing solution by downloading a trial evaluation of the production software. The white paper Testing Your Disaster Recovery Ability, written by Paul Robichaux, Exchange MVP and partner at 3sharp LLC., is an excellent resource to help to complete your disaster recovery testing research.

Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing solution or contact us for information related to your specific high availability software needs.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery works in conjunction with our CA XOsoft Replication and CA XOsoft High Availability disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery can be used to build a highly cost-effective offsite backup or consolidated backup solution. See our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery Backup page for more details.

For more detail on the technologies that enable CA XOsoft Assured Recovery's patent pending capabilities, see our accompanying advanced discussion of replication, high availability and automated testing technology or read our advanced architecture overview white paper, Disaster Recovery and High Availability with WANSync: An Architectural Overview.

Key Benefits of CA XOsoft's Disaster Recovery Test Solution

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery brings enormous value to your organization. Never before has any software product been able to test your DR systems as effectively and as cost efficiently. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery automates critical parts of a full disaster recovery test and, more importantly, allows you to perform disaster recovery tests much more often, even daily or once every few hours. It also lets you rest assured that backups of data, applications and servers are actually intact, and will allow you to keep working in case of disaster.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery allows you to be proactive about guaranteeing the availability of your systems and, in turn, ensures that your company is at the forefront of best business practices. Major benefits of CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing include:

Increased Assurance of the Effectiveness of Your Disaster Recovery System

Your high availability and disaster recovery systems are only as good as the results of the latest test. If you don't test, you can't be sure that your disaster recovery solution is ready to handle a disaster. With CA XOsoft Assured Recovery you can test as frequently as you wish, without the tremendous cost that testing normally incurs and without putting your production systems in danger.

• Automated, zero-impact testing — Allows you to test as frequently as several times a day.
• Continuous Protection, Even While Testing — Enables full testing of your disaster recovery capability without compromising protection at any time.
• Application Awareness — CA XOsoft Assured Recovery does not just test data — it actively tests recoverability of industry-standard applications (Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft IIS, Oracle)
• Validated Backups & Snapshots — automatically trigger backups, snapshots and other actions upon successful test completion
• Flexible Testing — run fully automated standard disaster recovery tests, customized automated tests, or carry out user initiated tests of the DR system
• Non-Disruptive Setup and Operation — no system reboots or application shutdowns required; disaster recovery tests involve no downtime at all

Dramatically Reduced Disaster Recovery Testing Cost

Disaster recovery testing is normally expensive, in IT staff time, downtime, and increased risk. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery employs CA XOsoft's unique rewind technology and automation expertise to eliminate all of these costs.

• Immediate ROI — expensive disaster recovery exercises no longer required; automated management avoids the need for manual IT intervention
• Makes the Most of Existing Investments — no additional hardware or software required
• Integrated with Microsoft VSS — on Windows 2003 servers, CA XOsoft Assured Recovery directly integrates the creation and management of Microsoft's VSS snapshot technology

What's the Big Deal about Disaster Recovery Testing?

When asked about the challenges of testing their disaster recovery systems, businesses overwhelmingly agree that resources and cost are the two biggest issues. Resource-related challenges typically involve the fact that disaster recovery tests are highly time-consuming, as well as scheduling conflicts and lack of sufficient capacity, hardware and personnel. Another significant challenge is the risk of downtime and associated costs caused by the disaster recovery tests themselves — which completely contradicts the purpose of deploying a disaster recovery system in the first place! It's no surprise that 70% of data center managers haven't rushed to implement disaster recovery testing plans.

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Source: TheInfoPro October 2004

An effective test of data that has been replicated to a backup server is no simple matter. Ensuring that an application can start, read and successfully work with the data requires that the application data be modified. For most disaster recovery products this means that protection must be turned off during the test! Once protection is turned back on, of course, a time-consuming resynchronization of the data must be performed as well.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery for Critical Applications: Support for Exchange, SQL, IIS and Oracle

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery Disaster Recovery Test at Work

[Enlarge]A CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery test may be fully automated and scheduled to run at any desired frequency — once a week, once a day, even once every few hours. Relevant staff can be alerted to test status, and additional actions, such as running a snapshot or backup of verified data, may be triggered upon successful test completion. Providing validation of the application before the backup is performed provides a critical new component to the backup process.

Should you prefer, CA XOsoft Assured Recovery allows you to manually test the application as well. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing fills a critical gap and increases confidence within management that the organization is truly disaster-ready.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery is directly integrated with the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows 2003 servers, which provides the ability to perform a snapshot of data immediately after its consistency and integrity has been verified.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery's patent pending capabilities are powered by CA XOsoft's Replication built-in rewind technology, which was the first true continuous data protection technology to be commercially available. If you would like to understand better the technologies that underlie CA XOsoft Assured Recovery and CA XOsoft's other products, see our accompanying advanced discussion of replication, high availability and automated testing technology.

What the IT Professionals Have to Say . . .

In a study conducted by TheInfoPro in November of 2004, an alarming 44% of respondents stated that they only tested their disaster recovery systems and procedures once a year! When asked how confident they were that their disaster recovery systems would provide the required levels of business continuity for their organization when problems arose, 39% said they were only somewhat confident.

Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that resources and cost were the two biggest issues in the way of disaster recovery system testing. Resource issues included such specifics as tests being time consuming, scheduling difficulties, and lack of sufficient capacity, hardware, and personnel. The risk of downtime, which completely contradicts the purpose of deploying a disaster recovery system in the first place, was also pointed out as a critical issue.

In terms of costs, numerous Fortune 1,000 companies pointed out that each disaster recovery test cost them anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million. Smaller companies indicated costs ranging from $30,000 to $500,000 per disaster recovery test.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery significantly reduces disaster recovery test costs and provides ROI immediately, after a single disaster recovery test. The solution increases your confidence in your disaster recovery solution by allowing you to perform more frequent disaster recovery testing and to automatically link backups and snapshots to successful data validation.

Learn how CA XOsoft helped assure Max Re of the recoverability of their data in this case study.

Not Just Answering to Your CEO

Ensuring that critical business systems are fully disaster-ready is not just an operational issue. It is also a strategic question of how ready your business is to respond to major disruptions and who that impacts if you are not. So it is not simply a question of the CEO's demands. Both good governance considerations and legal compliance issues demand that critical business systems be fully disaster-ready. Contingency plans must include backups, preparation of emergency facilities that can be used to ensure operational continuity in the event of a disaster, and on-going testing of these facilities.

If you work in healthcare, you must meet HIPAA requirements. If you belong to the accounting industry, you'll have to follow Sarbanes-Oxley standards, and if you are part of any financial institution, the Graham-Leach Bliley Act applies.

Even if your organization isn't required by law to meet certain standards, you can avoid serious risk to your company by elevating business continuity and disaster recovery testing to a strategic level. This includes testing your disaster recovery and backup plans and ensuring stakeholders that "all systems are go".

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery allows you to be proactive about guaranteeing the availability of your systems and, in turn, ensures that your company is at the forefront of best business practices.

Find Out More

Learn more about our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery test solution by downloading a trial evaluation of the production software. The white paper Testing Your Disaster Recovery Ability, written by Paul Robichaux, Exchange MVP and partner at 3sharp LLC., will help to complete your disaster recovery testing research.

Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing solution or contact us for information related to your specific high availability software needs.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery works in conjunction with our CA XOsoft Replication and CA XOsoft High Availability disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery can be used to build a highly cost-effective offsite backup or consolidated backup solution. See our CA XOsoft Assured Recovery Backup page for more details.

For more detail on the technologies that enable CA XOsoft Assured Recovery's patent pending capabilities, see our accompanying advanced discussion of replication, high availability and automated testing technology or read our advanced architecture overview white paper, Disaster Recovery and High Availability with WANSync: An Architectural Overview.