Disaster Recovery, Featured, Storage and Information Management

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, or DRaaS: Revisited

By Randy Weis

The idea of offering Disaster Recovery services has been around as long as SunGard or IBM BCRS (Business Continuity & Resiliency Services). Disclaimer: I worked for the company that became IBM Information Protection Services in 2008, a part of BCRS.

It seems inevitable that Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage should have an impact on the kinds of solutions that small, medium and large companies would find attractive and would fit their requirements. Those cloud-based DR services are not taking the world by storm, however. Why is that?

Cloud infrastructure seems perfectly suited for economical DR solutions, yet I would bet that none of the people reading this blog has found a reasonable selection of cloud-based DR services in the market. That is not to say that there aren’t DR “As a Service” companies, but the offerings are limited. Again, why is that?

Much like Cloud Computing in general, the recent emergence of enabling technologies was preceded by a relatively long period of commercial product development. In other words, virtualization of computing resources promised “cloud” long before we actually could make it work commercially. I use the term “we” loosely…Seriously, GreenPages announced a cloud-centric solutions approach more than a year before vCloud Director was even released. Why? We saw the potential, but we had to watch for, evaluate, and observe real-world performance in the emerging commercial implementations of self-service computing tools in a virtualized datacenter marketplace. We are now doing the same thing in the evolving solutions marketplace around derivative applications such as DR and archiving.

I looked into helping put together a DR solution leveraging cloud computing and cloud storage offered by one of our technology partners that provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). I had operational and engineering support from all parties in this project and we ran into a couple of significant obstacles that do not seem to be resolved in the industry.

Bottom line:

  1. A DR solution in the cloud, involving recovering virtual servers in a cloud computing infrastructure, requires administrative access to the storage as well as the virtual computing environment (like being in vCenter).
  2. Equally important, if the solution involves recovering data from backups, is the requirement that there be a high speed, low latency (I call this “back-end”) connection between the cloud storage where the backups are kept and the cloud computing environment. This is only present in Amazon at last check (a couple of months ago), and you pay extra for that connection. I also call this “locality.”
  3. The Service Provider needs the operational workflow to do this. Everything I worked out with our IaaS partners was a manual process that went way outside normal workflow and ticketing. The interfaces for the customer to access computing and storage were separate and radically different. You couldn’t even see the capacity you consumed in cloud storage without opening a ticket. From the SP side, notification of DR tasks they would need to do, required by the customer, didn’t exist. When you get to billing, forget it. Everyone admitted that this was not planned for at all in the cloud computing and operational support design.

Let me break this down:

  • Cloud Computing typically has high speed storage to host the guest servers.
  • Cloud Storage typically has “slow” storage, on separate systems and sometimes separate locations from a cloud computing infrastructure. This is true with most IaaS providers, although some Amazon sites have S3 and EC2 in the same building and they built a network to connect them (LOCALITY).

Scenario 1: Recovering virtual machines and data from backup images

Scenario 2: Replication based on virtual server-based tools (e.g. Veeam Backup & Replication) or host-based replication

Scenario 3: SRM, array or host replication

Scenario 1: Backup Recovery. I worked hard on this with a partner. This is how it would go:

  1. Back up VMs at customer site; send backup or copy of it to cloud storage.
  2. Set up a cloud computing account with an AD server and a backup server.
  3. Connect the backup server to the cloud storage backup repository (first problem)
    • Unless the cloud computing system has a back end connection at LAN speed to the cloud storage, this is a showstopper. It would take days to do this without a high degree of locality.
    • Provider solution when asked about this.
      • Open a trouble ticket to have the backups dumped to USB drives, shipped or carried to the cloud computing area and connected into the customer workspace. Yikes.
      • We will build a back end connection where we have both cloud storage and cloud computing in the same building—not possible in every location, so the “access anywhere” part of a cloud wouldn’t apply.

4. Restore the data to the cloud computing environment (second problem)

    • What is the “restore target”? If the DR site were a typical hosted or colo site, the customer backup server would have the connection and authorization to recover the guest server images to the datastores, and the ability to create additional datastores. In vCenter, the Veeam server would have the vCenter credentials and access to the vCenter storage plugins to provision the datastores as needed and to start up the VMs after restoring/importing the files. In a Cloud Computing service, your backup server does NOT have that connection or authorization.
    • How can the customer backup server get the rights to import VMs directly into the virtual VMware cluster? The process to provision VMs in most cloud computing environments is to use your templates, their templates, or “upload” an OVF or other type of file format. This won’t work with a backup product such as Veeam or CommVault.

5. Recover the restored images as running VMs in the cloud computing environment (third problem), tied to item #4.

    • Administrative access to provision datastores on the fly and to turn on and configure the machines is not there. The customer (or GreenPages) doesn’t own the multitenant architecture.
    • The use of vCloud Director ought to be an enabler, but the storage plugins, and rights to import into storage, don’t really exist for vCloud. Networking changes need to be accounted for and scripted if possible.

Scenario 2: Replication by VM. This has cost issues more than anything else.

    • If you want to replicate directly into a cloud, you will need to provision the VMs and pay for their resources as if they were “hot.” It would be nice if there was a lower “DR Tier” for pricing—if the VMs are for DR, you don’t get charged full rates until you turn them on and use for production.
      • How do you negotiate that?
      •  How does the SP know when they get turned on?
      • How does this fit into their billing cycle?
    • If it is treated as a hot site (or warm), then the cost of the DR site equals that of production until you solve these issues.
    • Networking is an issue, too, since you don’t want to turn that on until you declare a disaster.
      • Does the SP allow you to turn up networking without a ticket?
      • How do you handle DNS updates if your external access depends on root server DNS records being updated—really short TTL? Yikes, again.
    • Host-based replication (e.g. WANsync, VMware)—you need a host you can replicate to. Your own host. The issues are cost and scalability.

Scenario 3: SRM. This should be baked into any serious DR solution, from a carrier or service provider, but many of the same issues apply.

    • SRM based on host array replication has complications. Technically, this can be solved by the provider by putting (for example) EMC VPLEX and RecoverPoint appliances at every customer production site so that you can replicate from dissimilar storage to the SP IDC. But, they need to set up this many-to-one relationship on arrays that are part of the cloud computing solution, or at least a DR cloud computing cluster. Most SPs don’t have this. There are other brands/technologies to do this, but the basic configuration challenge remains—many-to-one replication into a multi-tenant storage array.
    • SRM based on VMware host replication has administrative access issues as well. SRM at the DR site has to either accommodate multi-tenancy, or each customer gets their own SRM target. Also, you need a host target. Do you rent it all the time? You have to, since you can’t do that in a multi-tenant environment. Cost, scalability, again!
    • Either way, now the big red button gets pushed. Now what?
      • All the protection groups exist on storage and in cloud computing. You are now paying for a duplicate environment in the cloud, not an economically sustainable approach unless you have a “DR Tier” of pricing (see Scenario 2).
      • All the SRM scripts kick in—VMs are coming up in order in protection groups, IP addresses and DNS are being updated, CPU loads and network traffic climb…what impact is this?
      • How does that button get pushed? Does the SP need to push it? Can the customer do it?

These are the main issues as I see it, and there is still more to it. Using vCloud Director is not the same as using vCenter. Everything I’ve described was designed to be used in a vCenter-managed system, not a multi-tenant system with fenced-in rights and networks, with shared storage infrastructure. The APIs are not there, and if they were, imagine the chaos and impact on random DR tests on production cloud computing systems, not managed and controlled by the service provider. What if a real disaster hit in New England, and a hundred customers needed to spin up all their VMs in a few hours? They aren’t all in one datacenter, but if one provider that set this up had dozens, that is a huge hit. They need to have all the capacity in reserve, or syndicate it like IBM or SunGard do. That is the equivalent of thin-provisioning your datacenter.

This conversation, as many I’ve had in the last two years, ends somewhat unsatisfactorily with the conclusion that there is no clear solution—today. The journey to discovering or designing a DRaaS is important, and it needs to be documented, as we have done here with this blog and in other presentations and meetings. The industry will overcome these obstacles, but the customer must remain informed and persistent. The goal of an economically sustainable DRaaS solution can only be achieved by market pressure and creative vendors. We will do our part by being your vigilant and dedicated cloud services broker and solution services provider.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Analysing cloud computing and the healthcare industry

Cloud computing has touched many industries and is increasingly being adopted in many ways, from easily accessible data storage to business application solutions and reduction in hardware investment. The healthcare industry is no exception: here we outline some of the ways in which cloud computing can be of benefit in the future.

1. The secure storage of patient records

Doctors and medical staff are bound by oaths, especially with regards to patient confidentiality. Having secure cloud storage is therefore paramount.

The first generation of cloud computing had security issues, however now that these have been ironed out, the cloud is more secure than ever. In the US, hospitals must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

2. Reducing the cost of data storage

Utilising the cloud can save the healthcare service a lot of money. Subscriptions can equate to approximately a 90% saving on hardware investments, especially when …

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TwinStrata Reports Record Year

TwinStrata, Inc., on Tuesday highlighted results for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2012. The year was punctuated by a series of corporate and product milestones.
TwinStrata CEO Nicos Vekiarides noted that the company’s “tremendous growth this year validates not only the TwinStrata value proposition, but also the increasing traction of cloud storage as a whole.”
TwinStrata ended the year with substantial growth across all measures of its business:
Throughout 2012, TwinStrata experienced sequential bookings growth of 35 percent or more quarter over quarter.

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Hybrid Cloud Power

As the hybrid cloud becomes the cloud of choice for the enterprise, you can expect cloud integration to eventually replace cloud migration as a solution of choice.  While migration supports the migration of apps into public clouds, cloud integration supports cloud migration, cloud failover,  devtest cloud (or cloud cloning) and cloud bursting. Migration is a […]

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Reining in Enterprise IT Management Costs

There are many products that are needed to manage enterprise IT infrastructure and due consideration is needed before picking the right set of products.
Simplifying IT administration is a goal for CIOs to reduce manual intervention while running day-to-day operations with the primary goal of reducing the percentage of their IT budgets spent on maintenance. The IT management costs of web companies like Google and Facebook (which cater to tens of millions of users) are extremely low when compared to the size of their infrastructures. A huge advantage they and other super-efficient companies share is gained by 1) a mostly virtualized compute workloads 2) very little legacy infrastructure and 3) most applications written to follow common patterns optimized to take full advantage of virtualized resources. Having learned from managing compute infrastructures, these companies have extended this best practice to managing storage and network resources, too.

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Essential Cloud Computing Characteristics

If you ask five different experts you will get maybe five different opinions what cloud computing is. And all five may be correct. The best definition of cloud computing that I have ever found is the National Institute of Standards and Technology Definition of Cloud Computing. According to NIST the cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. In this post I will look at the essential characteristics only, and compare to the traditional computing models; in future posts I will look at the service and deployment models.
Because computing always implies resources (CPU, memory, storage, networking etc.), the premise of cloud is an improved way to provision, access and manage those resources. Let’s look at each essential characteristic of the cloud.

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Cloud Computing: Panzura Gets Global Cloud-Attached Storage Patents

Panzura, a start-up with global cloud storage solutions, has gotten three patents on its widgetry from the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The company says the new patents recognize the underlying technology of its Panzura Operating System, which forms the core of its Global Cloud Storage System. It says it’s the industry’s first storage solution to bring advanced NAS capabilities to a distributed, cloud-integrated storage tier, providing a globally distributed storage system with LAN-like performance.

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Voice, Voxware

Voxware Fully Commits to Cloud-Based Enterprise Voice Solution

Voxware today announced the evolution of its Cloud Voice Management Suite (VMS) for the enterprise. This latest offering from Voxware enables organizations off all sizes to migrate to a cloud-based voice management system to enhance operational productivity, improve accuracy and better serve its customers without investing in costly IT infrastructure.

Voxware solutions will be on display at ProMat 2013 at booth 3550 from January 21st through 24th.

This past summer, Voxware had announced the industry’s first premier voice picking cloud solution. Organizations like Hollywood Feed and Wagner SprayTech immediately adopted and deployed the solution and shortly thereafter, realized immediate gains and return on investment. Due to a ground swell of interest from customers and prospects at that time, Voxware has elected to extend the solution and fold in its complete VMS into the product. Now, small, mid and large organizations of any size can leverage the solution to handle all of their warehouse and in-store requirements while improving internal operations and brand reputation initiatives.

“In a very short amount of time, we have realized that any organization can benefit from our proven voice management suite that resides in the cloud. We have acted swiftly to evolve our cloud-based voice solution to incorporate all of the applications that our customers require beyond picking,” said Keith Phillips, President and CEO, Voxware. “This evolution demonstrates that we view innovation and enhancement as an ongoing, interdependent process made possible by the expertise of our team of engineers and the invaluable feedback of our customers.”

Cloud Enterprise VMS is a cost-effective, high impact voice option that will deliver the same level of quality as Voxware’s flagship on-premise offering. The ease with which Voxware can deploy and manage Cloud Enterprise VMS will simplify an organization’s installation process and drive better business results while realizing all of the benefits of a cloud-based solution. Those benefits include:

  • No IT overhead: Cloud Enterprise VMS can run without an IT infrastructure, eliminating costs associated with server hardware, maintenance and IT personnel
  • Time-to-value: The delivery time is significantly shorter than the fastest full-fledged voice solution
  • Future-proof: Users receive automatic software updates, as well as hardware refreshes, to ensure they are always leveraging the latest technologies
  • No WMS necessary: Small operations that run without a WMS can now realize the benefits of a voice solution
  • Straightforward SaaS model: This model guarantees that users get what they pay for, without any hidden fees or peripheral maintenance costs

Cloud Enterprise VMS is available immediately. Prospects and customers can request it through their Voxware sales representative or by contacting Voxware at 877-483-7239.

Electronic medical record, Health administration, Health Care, Medical, Medical Billing, Partnerships

iSALUS Healthcare, CIPROMS Partner to Launch Revenue Cycle Management

iSALUS Healthcare, a privately held electronic medical records and practice management service provider, and CIPROMS, Inc., an Indianapolis-based revenue cycle management firm, are partnering to offer medical billing and revenue cycle management services.  The agreement allows both organizations to co-promote their respective services.

“The healthcare industry is quickly becoming more automated with electronic medical records.  We felt it was time to provide a fully integrated service that could save physicians time, improve efficiency, and enhance patient care, while delivering increased financial performance.  It is critical for our organization to be aligned with a leading EMR and practice management solution provider, and we were fortunate to find that team right here in Indianapolis,” said Cheryl Louks , president and CEO of CIPROMS.

The management at both iSALUS and CIPROMS recognized that in today’s fast-paced medical environment, there is little time for providers to focus on all the necessary details to ensure a practice is reaching its financial potential.  As such, the partnership addresses the market need to deliver medical billing services within a web-based EMR.  This solution is designed to increase practice revenue, reduce costs, and minimize the administrative aggravations associated with the ever-changing rules and regulations.

“Being a 100% mobile practice poses challenges for a traditional EMR company and managing all the paper charting became very burdensome and time consuming for me as a physician.  I wanted to transition to an EMR for process improvement and efficiencies and knew an all-inclusive solution was ideal.  I chose OfficeEMR™ RCM for its simplicity, mobile application, and the ability to provide medical billing services within an integrated cloud-based service,” said Dr. Irene Roge , D.P.M.  “It is great to have one affordable solution that services both the clinical and financial aspects of my practice.”

“Our partnership with CIPROMS is a noteworthy milestone for iSALUS.  Physician practices are increasingly forced to navigate the choppy waters of changing regulations while trying to manage constant margin pressure.  It was imperative that we offer our clients a ‘best in class’ solution to address such pressures.  We have a long-standing relationship with CIPROMS and I am pleased to be moving forward with this all-in-one service,” said Michael Hall , founder and CEO of iSALUS Healthcare.

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Can the Cloud Boost Small Businesses?

There’s consistent chatter about the new world of the cloud, and much of the discussion involves how a small business saves substantially and can then invest the savings elsewhere in its business.
For many small businesses that have used the cloud for a few years, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the experience has largely been positive.
Operating servers both on-site and in the cloud is “a very effective way of reducing risk,” said Michael Harries, chief technologist at Citrix Startup Accelerator, a Silicon Valley investment firm that works specifically with software startups, according to the Journal.
Business owners should make their cloud-deployment decisions based on the “support they have available,” he said.
Harpaul Sambhi, chief executive of social-media recruitment firm Careerify, said running his company solely in the cloud has allowed him to focus more on business growth. Careerify allows a company to connect to its employees’ social networks in order to find candidates for jobs at that company, be it through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Sambhi said because an average employee has about 300 social-media contacts, he didn’t want to burden his staff of 12 with trying to maintain servers that are mining the data of hundreds of thousands of users.
“It’s a lot of work for us,” he said.

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The cloud news categorized.