IBM Global Technology Services Essay Example

center failure. Over time, two models emerged: dedicated and shared. However, these models often required organizations to sacrifice either cost effectiveness or speed.

IBM Global Technology Services highlights this dilemma in their discussion on traditional disaster recovery approaches. Typically, organizations consider two recovery objectives: the recovery time objective (ROOT), which measures how long it takes to restore operations after an outage; and the recovery point objective (RPR), which determines when data is restored and indicates potential data loss during the recovery process.The dedicated model for IT infrastructure allocates resources exclusively to one organization, ensuring faster recovery in the event of a disaster due to mirrored hardware and software already set up at the recovery site. However, there may still be delays as tapes need to be physically transported and data restoration processes are required. Some organizations use their backup infrastructure for development and testing purposes to reduce costs but this introduces additional risks. The overall process of data restoration can take up to 72 hours including tape retrieval, travel, and loading. Traditional models require organizations to choose between cost and speed of recovery. In a shared disaster recovery model, the infrastructure is shared among multiple organizations for cost-effectiveness but configuring hardware, OS, and application software at the disaster site takes hours or days. Additionally, the data restoration process averages 48 to 72 hours for recovery. Oodles 4 Shared requires a minimum of 4 hours for hardware setup, a minimum of 8-24 hours for software setup, and a minimum of 4 hours for Data Restore (Figure 3).Figure 4 illustrates the time it takes to recover when utilizing a shared infrastructure. The demand for constant availability is considerably

high. As per the IBM 2011 CIO study, organizations are confronted with the challenge of meeting increasing demands on their IT departments while ensuring efficient and smooth operations. Users and customers are becoming more tech-savvy, with a yearly growth rate of around 42 percent in the usage of Internet-connected devices, which grants them quick access to extensive storage capabilities. Despite needing to accomplish more, organizations allocate a significant portion of their resources to maintaining their existing infrastructure. Budget increases are minimal, resulting in essentially unchanged budgets. In the past, organizations that used dedicated or shared disaster recovery models had to compromise between cost and speed. However, as the pressure to achieve continuous availability and reduce costs continues to rise, such tradeoffs can no longer be made by organizations. Initially focused on critical batch "back-office" processes, disaster recovery now heavily relies on real-time applications and online presence as primary means of customer interaction for many organizations. Any downtime directly affects an organization's brand image, and customers find interruptions in key applications like e-commerce, online banking, and customer self-service unacceptable.It can be very expensive to experience even a minute of downtime. Traditional methods for disaster recovery require declaring a disaster in order to utilize backup infrastructure during events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, or fires. However, most disruptions in application availability are actually caused by more common occurrences like power outages and server hardware failures. While weather is responsible for just over half of the declared disasters among IBM clients, other causes account for the remaining 50 percent. In today's world where organizations operate around the clock, it is important to move beyond just focusing on disaster

recovery and instead prioritize application continuity. It is crucial to plan for the recovery of critical business applications rather than solely rare catastrophic events and create resilient plans accordingly. Power HOW/SW weather accounts for 54% of interruptions to business continuity while other causes make up the rest (Figure 5). Cloud-based business resilience offers an innovative alternative to traditional disaster recovery methods. Cloud computing involves a shared infrastructure where resources are pooled and costs are distributed among all users of the cloud service. This shared nature makes the cloud an ideal model for disaster recovery. Even if we expand our definition of disaster recovery to include more common service disruptions, there remains an irregular need for recovery resources.The text discusses the benefits of using cloud-based business resilience for backup and recovery. It states that since it is unlikely that all organizations will need the infrastructure simultaneously, costs can be reduced and recovery time accelerated. The text also mentions IBM Smallwood Brutalized Server Recovery as an example of a managed service that combines cost-effective shared physical recovery with the speed provided by dedicated infrastructure.

It explains that constant replication of server images and data allows for significantly reduced recovery time, sometimes even to just minutes or seconds. The advantages of cloud-based business resilience over traditional models are mentioned, including predictable monthly operating expenses, reduced upfront capital expenditure, scalability based on changing conditions, and portal access saving time and money by eliminating the need to travel to the recovery site.When planning for the transition to cloud-based business resilience and selecting a cloud partner, it is important to consider certain factors that can facilitate improved control with portal access. In

the past, organizations viewed disaster recovery as an insurance policy they hoped they wouldn't need. However, cloud-based business resilience actually enhances IT's ability to ensure service continuity for critical business applications. Through a web portal, IT management and administrators can gain visibility into their organization's infrastructure. For instance, clients can go online to the Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery portal and identify servers that require protection and replication.
Customers also have the option to download client software for their covered servers using the same portal. Once the environment has been defined in the portal, clients can use its administrative view to monitor the status of protection. It is crucial, however, to consider cloud-based business resilience services that allow not only configuration but also initiation of failover and fallback processes through the portal. With Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery, clients can utilize the portal for near real-time failover, reducing reliance on contacting the cloud service provider.The portal offers failover and fallback capability, disaster recovery testing, tiered service levels, and compatibility with mixed server environments. It also allows for migration from traditional disaster recovery methods and has global reach with a local presence. Figure 8 shows the IBM Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery portal. Figure 9 depicts the administrative view of the recovery portal, while Figure 10 illustrates the DRY Testing view using IBM Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery reviver to declare a disaster or initiate failover. IT can be more responsive to outages and interruptions without formal declaration by failing over from the portal. However, it is important to consider that incidents should not occur only once or twice per year due to rapid changes in most IT departments. Some organizations

have brought disaster recovery "in house" for control purposes but this diverts critical IT focus from mainline application development. Cloud-based business resilience provides an opportunity for increased control and frequent testing of disaster recovery plans at the server or application level. The Compactors Brutalized enables server recovery through a DRY Testing view in the portal, allowing IT to test failover and fallback processes more regularly.One challenge with traditional disaster recovery is the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of the planned solution. Typically, organizations only test their failover and recovery processes for a limited duration of 8 minutes using Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery Service Level Gold Always Available Virtual Machine Recovery Time Objective (until system boot start). This approach may not be suitable for mission-critical applications that require near-zero ROOT/RPR and continuous availability beyond recovery services. Alternatively, for applications needing quick recovery within minutes and remote accessibility during disasters, a cloud-based recovery infrastructure can be adopted. Furthermore, clients desiring to import server images and data from tape/disk/NAS into our cloud infrastructure for failover and fallback purposes are also accommodated. Additionally, there is a migration path available for Infrastructure Recovery Service clients to transition into cloud recovery services. The Silver Disaster and Test Virtual Machine Bronze Imported Media Virtual Machine offers a 30-minute failover time on either a 6 to 24-hour or best effort basis, including assisted failover and fallback assistance. Moreover, clients have the flexibility to schedule testing based on their needs; such as testing critical e-Commerce applications before peak online shopping periods like Cyber Monday or conducting tests after an online banking system's version upgrade to ensure a seamless failover and fallback process.The Bronze option is

available. These tiers enable organizations to optimize their budget by allocating more funds to mission-critical applications, ensuring almost continuous availability, and allocating fewer funds to non-critical applications. With Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery, the frequency of data replication and resulting RPR/ROOT depends on the assigned service level for each server. Multiple servers supporting the same applications and business processes can be grouped together with the same service level to ensure consistency and synchronization during failover and fallback operations. Business resilience based on tiered service levels allows differentiation of applications based on their importance to the organization and tolerance for downtime. For example, Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery offers three service level options: Gold, Silver, and 9 Efficiently. It efficiently supports mixed environments with brutalized disaster recovery. The concept of a "server image" plays a crucial role in traditional disaster recovery as IT departments become more complex with multiple server farms having different operating systems and operating system (SO) levels, responding to a disaster or outage becomes more challenging.
Organizations often need to recover on different hardware, which can prolong the process and increase the risk of errors and data loss. However, organizations are now adopting fertilization technologies in their data centers to simplify complexity and improve infrastructure utilization. The usage of virtual machines has been rapidly increasing in recent years. A recent survey by IBM revealed that 98 percent of Chief Information Officers have either already implemented or plan to implement fertilization within the next year.

For cloud-based business resilience solutions to support these environments, they must offer both physical-to-virtual (POP) and virtual-to-virtual (VI) recovery options. Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery is capable of supporting brutalized, unventilated, and mixed environments

with multiple operating systems.

To achieve bandwidth savings when adopting cloud-based business resilience, it is beneficial to have a local presence. Global providers like IBM can provide this local presence, reducing the need for extensive data travel through the network.IBM offers a service called Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery, which allows clients to replicate their server configuration, operating system, application software, and data to the IBM Resiliency Center via the internet or a designated network connection. This service aims to ensure cross-server consistency and enhance security and risk reduction for disaster recovery. IBM also provides an Estimator tool to assess network bandwidth requirements for this service. By hosting Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery in their network, IBM adds confidence that sensitive data is protected. Clients can start using the service with as few as five virtual machines, making it easy and relatively risk-free to get started. With over 1,800 dedicated professionals and 160 resilience centers, IBM is recognized as a leader in business continuity and resilience. They have extensive experience in business resilience and disaster recovery spanning over 50 years and serving over 9,000 clients. Leveraging their expertise in systems after being in the industry for 60 years, IBM can help design and implement a tailored business resilience solution for any organization's needs.Although cloud-based resilience has its benefits, a well-rounded disaster recovery strategy would probably involve both traditional methods and cloud-based approaches. IBM's Bronze level service for Compactors Brutalized Server Recovery can help with this transition by integrating cloud-based resilience with data backup solutions such as IBM Compactors Managed Backup.