Business Continuity Solution
The Business continuity solution can help the company recover from disasters and achieve the uninterrupted availability of the systems and applications for 7*24 hours.
l There are more and more integrated information technologies and the business data have developed from dispersion to centralization. As a result, the losses caused by single disaster are becoming greater;
l In the fierce market competition, it has become harder for users to withstand the losses of the important data and critical business systems caused by downtime.
l Establish a disaster-tolerant system and develop a disaster recovery plan to achieve the business continuity. It has become increasingly necessary to ensure the availability of critical business processes and information system and reduce the risk associated with downtime.
Hierarchical Division of Business Continuity
Information System Disaster Recovery Specification has defined the business continuity levels from 0-7:
l Level 0: There is no off-site backup system. The data is only partially and locally recovered. It is not the "disaster" backups in real sense;
l Level 1: There is data backup but no backup system. The data is usually backed up to magnetic tape and transferred to other places but there is no backup system to recover data;
l Level 2: There are data backup and backup systems. The data is backed up to magnetic tape and sent to a location with a backup system;
l Level 3: It is transmitted by electronic link and supported by device. Based on the solution of level 2, the data is transmitted to the backup center through the link after the magnetic tape backup,
l Forming the integrity data with the magnetic tape; (Magnetic tapes are often used for backup and transmission in the levels from 1-3)
l Level 4: It is transmitted by electronic link and supported by complete equipment (based on the tape). All the data processing equipment, communication lines and the corresponding network equipment should be equipped for disaster recovery and they must be online or in operational status;
l Level 5: Transaction Integrity. Asynchronous data mirroring has ensured the data consistency but damaged the data integrity;
l Level 6: There is a small amount loss of data or no data lost. Remote data mirroring has guaranteed both the data integrity and data consistency ( just like the synchronous replication);
l Level 7: The solution shall be combined with specific business to achieve the autonomous management and remote data mirroring. And the highly automated system takeover can be done in the business environment.
Data Replication Technology of Business Continuity
The core of business continuity is data replication. On the basis of data preservation, different levels of business continuity are achieved by deploying application systems and business network. At present, the industry has a variety of feasible technologies to accomplish the remote data replication at different levels of the IT architecture, thus achieving the business continuity:
Synchronous replication in transaction level based on the application level;
l Data replication based on the database level;
lData replication based on the server logical disk volumes;
l Data replication based on the exchange level of storage network;
lData replication based on disk array level;
l Other ways of replication.
Choice of Business Continuity Solutions
Measurable Indicators of Business Continuity. RPO and RTO:
1. RPO (Recovery Pomt Objective) refers to the amount of data loss that the business system can tolerate;
2. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) mainly refers to the longest tolerable time that business service suspends, that is, the shortest time period required from the disaster to the recovery of the business system.
There is no inevitable connection between RPO and RTO. The smaller the two indicators, the higher availability the system has and the greater investment it needs.
