White Papers

There is evidence of strong correlation between how a company responds to business disruptions, and not just disastrous events, and its valuation by the market. It is expected that the c-level suite provide effective leadership of the business continuity risk process. From an investment management perspective, the task is not to minimize losses in the event of some disastrous occurrence, but rather to maximize return on all investments over all contingencies. Risk avoidance and transfer approaches are no longer sufficient mechanisms for coping with unforeseen but probable disruptions to your business continuity. A paradigm shift is required, driven through insightful leadership. Clearly, the ability to lead a company in actively assessing, managing, and responding to risk will be on the test. (pdf, 71 KB)

This paper discusses moving the backup function to the replica server through the integration of backup, replication and failover.

It resolves 3 major IT headaches:

1. Eliminates the backup window — no need to schedule downtime in order to run backups
2. Supplements backups with additional layers of protection that enable more rapid recovery
3. Mitigates risk and cost associated with transporting backup media to an offsite location or maintaining adequate IT staff at multiple branch locations.

The backup performed here is identical to the backup that would have been done on the production system. Further, additional checks may be performed during Assured Recovery testing, potentially enabling the backup to be performed on a more fully validated dataset than would have been possible on the production system.

Knowing your replica environment will function in the event of a failover, and being able to eliminate the backup window by running backups from the replica server saves time, money, and headaches. (pdf, 1 MB)

You can combine two very powerful solutions, VMware Infrastructure and CA XOsoft's WANSyncHA, to provide a multi-layered disaster recovery solution that covers a wide array of contingencies, is extremely cost-effective, and provides an unusually high degree of robustness and simplicity. (pdf, 1 MB)

Good disaster recovery planning is about identifying those processes and resources that are truly critical, developing realistic recovery objectives for them, and then developing a plan that can achieve those objectives as simply and cost-effectively as possible.

This guide is intended to help you negotiate the decisions that you'll need to make in order to develop an effective, executable plan that allows your organization to recover critical processes in order to function after a disaster. (pdf, 140 KB)

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into what XOsoft's disaster recovery and high availability solutions do and how they do it. It is intended for conscientious potential customers and partners who wish to understand just how WANSync protects their data, as well as how it ensures the integrity of both the data and the application. (pdf, 2 MB)

This essential guide will cover the different high availability technologies available for both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. It discusses the pros and cons of each level of protection, providing you with the information you need to determine which type of solution is the best option for providing continuous access to your SQL environment.

Topics include:

• Windows Clustering Services (XOsoft extend MSCS protection to off-site replicas)
• Database mirroring
• Log Shipping
• Basic and WAN Replication
• Database Snapshots

(pdf, 2 MB)

The disaster recovery (DR) vision is a scenario in which all disasters are withstood; using a well-crafted plan, operations are transferred to a remote facility to get the organization back online within recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) targets. But this is pure fantasy for most companies. The reality is that if a disaster should occur, nothing short of Herculean efforts by the IT staff would be required to have the slightest chance of getting back online in any reasonable period of time, much less the targeted RTO. This white paper gives you the top 10 reasons why your DR plan may fail. (pdf, 317 KB)

The primary IT concern today is to ensure that the applications and information that drive critical business processes are available when they are needed, whenever they are needed. We present a description of the required architecture and operation for an automatic failover solution, demonstrating how a solution should be carefully engineered for ease of operation and management. (pdf, 708 KB)

The primary information management concern in the enterprise today is to ensure that the knowledge necessary to drive critical business processes is available where it needs to be, when it needs to be. The costs of failure to do this are high. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue! In another study, Forrester estimated the average cost of downtime for e-commerce sites at $8,000 per hour — at larger sites like eBay, Intel and Amazon, the costs soar to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. (pdf, 149 KB)

Traditional backup systems provide a critical layer of insurance, but they represent all-or-nothing strategies that do not cover the minute by minute daily data writes to the disk. Continuous data protection fills in this gap by capturing changes to data while users are working. In the event of a data interruption, administrators can automatically reconstitute the data in reverse order to a point before it was corrupted or lost. (pdf, 349 KB)

Plenty of administrators have already implemented the basic measures of backup and recovery and shared storage, and they've either implemented clustering or rejected it as inappropriate in their environment. But none of the strategies I've described so far are sufficient by themselves to protect against large-scale problems such as hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or sustained local power outages. Those technologies all suffer from a common weakness: physical proximity. So the natural question is: What next? What more can you do to protect against major interruptions or outages? (pdf, 1 MB)

Achieve significant cost savings through consolidation of disaster recovery servers by combining the award-winning disaster protection of XOsoft's WANSync with the latest virtual server technologies from Microsoft and EMC. Consolidating disaster recovery servers on virtual machines can yield both reduced hardware costs and significantly lessened management burden. (pdf, 548 KB)

Extending your MSCS cluster offsite with a cluster aware high availability solution will close the gap in protection left open by MSCS shared storage clusters. Depending on your specific requirements "offsite" can be 10 miles, 200 miles, 1000 miles or even further. By utilizing a solution with integrated CDP technology you can also protect from data corruption, this includes damage done by viruses or human error. (pdf, 382 KB)

It doesn't matter how good your disaster recovery procedures and processes are if you don't test them. This stance may seem extreme, but disaster recovery is so important that the key metric is simple: either your procedures work as intended, or they don't. Finding out how well your processes work to restore your data, and continue your operations, is something you need to do before you need them. (pdf, 444 KB)