White Paper
Backup and Recovery Solutions with the MDS 9000 Family
Purpose
The purpose of this whitepaper is to discuss backup and recovery architectures and solutions and outline the applicable features of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches.
Introduction
Global enterprises with mission critical data residing on their servers demand continuous availability for their applications. Applications such as supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) are creating voluminous amounts of data that must be protected at all costs. At a minimum, this data must be backed up to tape regularly as an insurance policy against a potential loss of data. However, growing data volumes requiring larger storage capacity, faster servers, and also require longer time windows for backup. One must also consider that data that takes several hours to backup will also take the same length of time for a full restore should the need arise. This restore time is often unacceptable as it translates into lost revenue due to extended downtime. Therefore, in many cases, tape backup is considered a minimum level of disaster recovery (DR) planning.
In order to ensure 99.999% uptime required by these enterprise applications, a storage design must incorporate additional high availability considerations at every level. A disaster recovery plan, imperative for all enterprises, must address this concern of potential extended outages and provide seamless failover to a secondary site during major outages. Corporations often utilize replication technology to remotely replicate a whole data center, in addition to tape backup, in their DR plan. Therefore, a recovery now can include a data center fail over to a live remote location in addition to a data restore from tapes. Disasters can be caused by a myriad of factors and are difficult to predict. Some key scenarios are listed below:
•Equipment failure
•Application failure
•Human error
•Natural and unnatural disasters
Each enterprise must prepare to recover from disasters and identify all critical data that must be preserved for continuous access. Business impact and risk analysis must be performed to identify locations, functions, or applications most critical to the enterprise. A remote data center, a mirrored image of the primary one, is used to provide full access after a major disaster. Many DR solutions involve keeping
Cisco Systems, Inc.
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