How Scale Computing uses Scale's ICOS Storage

Webcast 3 of 3 – Using Scale for Disaster Recovery

Bill Waller

Director of IT

Agenda

Who is Scale?

ICOS

Why have a DR Plan?

Scale Production Environment

Backup and Retention

Server/Application Recovery Tips

Disaster Recovery Plan Basics

Who is Scale?

Founded in 2007, Scale Computing has led the way in unified, scale-out, enterprise class storage for small and medium-sized enterprises. The company is rapidly growing with offices in California, Indianapolis and London with global distribution partners.

Scale ICOS

Every Scale storage cluster is powered by ICOS™ Technology: an advanced storage operating system combining powerful features with intelligence that makes storage easy-to-manage, even for novices.

Generation 3.0 Storage

Scale-Out ArchitectureCapacity Performance

Density Agnostic

Unified SAN/NAS

No Controllers

Thin Provisioning

Global Namespace

ReplicationAuto-load balancing

Snapshots

Why Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

• System/Data loss is very expensive– Hardware Malfunction

– Human Error

– Software Corruption

– Computer Virus

– Natural Disaster

• Government Regulation Compliance– Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA)

– Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

– European Union Data Protection Directive

– Patriot Act

Ontrack Survey 2006

Backup & Retention

• Disk and Tape both have a place for Backup/DR

• Disk-Based Backup:– Automated Process (No need to load/rotate media)

– Scalable/Highly Available/Redundant storage

• Tape-Based Backup:– Manual Process (Rotate media)

– Multiple redundant backup sets

• For Disaster Recovery, you will want the most recent backups

• Take regular backups of your Critical Data

• Always retain multiple tested backups

Why Plans are Not Made

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DR Plan Basics

“Only half of all companies have a DR Plan. Of those that do, nearly half have never tested their plan, which is like not having one at all.”

•Document all critical systems – Business will not function without them (first to recover)

•Document system owners – Who is responsible for each system

•Document support contracts, contact information, and SLA’s

•Document system configurations

•Store your DR Plan off-site

•Backup System Data regularly

•Test, Test, Test!

Steps to Plan

The measurements of data protection are:

•The acceptable amount of time spent to reinstate access to data following a disruption.

•The acceptable amount of data lost in an outage event, measured in time

RTO = Recovery Time Objective

RPO = Recovery Point Objective

RTO and RPO

Scale Production Environment

• Multiple 3-Node R4 Scale Storage Cluster (12TB)– Redundant Power and Network Interface Cards (NICs)

• Scale’s Production Environment– 100% Virtualized Environment (ESXi 4.1)

– Exchange 2010 (DAG)

– Windows 2008 R2 (Domain Controllers/Active Directory)

– Linux/CentOS (Web Site/MySQL/Atlassian Tools)

– 45 Virtual Machines

• ICOS Snapshots/Replication Off-site

• Symantec BackupExec 2010– Backup for Exchange 2010

– Backup for vmWare ESXi

Server/Application Recovery Tips

• Keep multiple copies of your DR Plan and one off-site

• Store copies of application software off-site

• Document the application installation instructions in your DR plan

• Determine remote or local restore (RTO)

• Document support numbers, contract information, and SLA’s

• Easily restore data to ICOS Scale Storage

January 2012 – Scale Production

• Scale Production

• Physical/Virtualization

• Unified Storage

• Distributed Environment Strategies

• ROBO (Remote/Back Office)

• Monitoring

Questions?

Bill WallerDirector of ITwwaller@scalecomputing.comTwitter: WallerWilliam