During the winter, we saw atmospheric rivers in California and snowstorms in the Northeast, which left many businesses in the dark. Extreme weather conditions have tormented power infrastructures along U.S. coasts and in regions like southern Michigan and Austin, Texas.
Author: Bart Dries, Leaseweb USA
It goes without saying that a reliable power source is a vital resource to an organization’s data and IT infrastructure. As the recent weather-related events have shown, blackouts are a growing threat that every business must address as part of its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.
This presents companies an evolving IT challenge: How to safeguard critical workloads against an unplanned and extended loss of power?
Power Outages on the Rise
One possibility to keep IT infrastructure online during a blackout is to have a redundant power supply, for example, via locally stored electricity in batteries or emergency backup generators. Operators of critical infrastructures, such as data centers, hospitals, and airports, have such solutions in place.However, for many companies, there hasn’t been an urgent need yet to set up a redundant power supply. It’s worth noting that as natural disasters become more frequent and severe due to climate change, prolonged power outages will be a bigger threat. In fact, the decade from 2011-2021 experienced 64% more major power outages than that from 2000-2010.
The good news is that IT has an ace up its sleeve, particularly for its external applications. While its local operations would be essentially paralyzed in the event of a blackout, IT can relocate productive workloads relatively easily. The most critical applications are able to continue running uninterrupted in a duplicate, backup or cloud environment.
Thus, geographical redundancy is an effective way for companies to bounce back seamlessly from an unexpected disruption and guarantee the availability of IT services.
The question becomes more of a technical one: What systems and technologies are needed to implement a BCDR strategy for you?
Replication as the building block
Being able to provide geo-redundancy for an entire site is technologically the highest level of resilience within a BCDR strategy. What sounds simple, however, is hardly feasible in practice with traditional technologies. Besides the choice of the physical location for the secondary data center, the choice of the replication solution is the most important building block.Various technologies are available on the market to achieve geo-redundancy. While hardware-based solutions offer specific functions, replicating at the hypervisor level may be a more sensible approach. Virtualization platform providers offer solutions that work only within their own stack, and replicating through traditional snapshots may not be up-to-date or compatible with limited bandwidth.
To implement an appropriate BCDR strategy, replication should be asynchronous with the help of specialized software that is based on continuous data protection (CDP) and runs at the hypervisor level. Such a solution can be implemented in a very short time, without having to invest in hardware.
Planning for the unthinkable
Blackouts are on the rise, and the results can be disastrous for a business, leading to downtime and data loss. Companies can secure their most important data and workloads in the event of a local failure by having a secondary location that is geographically dispersed and an advanced software solution based on asynchronous replication and CDP. This way, productive workloads remain available with minimal impact on the business and the end-user experience.
