Disasters are no fun! According to Google’s online dictionary, a disaster is a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage. Because of the unexpected nature of disasters, all we can do to prepare for them is to have a backup plan and an insurance policy to help lessen the impact. Many of us don’t like to shop for insurance policies and it almost always feels like we are throwing away money. On the contrary, when a disaster strikes, boy aren’t you glad you had that insurance!
For many, IT disaster recovery is complex, unreliable and expensive, which is why Site Recovery Manager (SRM) has been so appealing to so many customers. SRM is the industry-leading solution which enables application availability and mobility across sites in private cloud environments.
SRM allows you to:
- Perform frequent non-disruptive testing to ensure IT disaster recovery predictability and compliance
- Achieve fast and reliable recovery using fully automated workflows and complementary Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) solutions across sites
- Protect thousands of virtual machines with ease using centralized recovery plans managed from the vSphere Web Client and use policy-driven automation and the SDDC architecture to simplify ongoing management
- Lower the total cost of ownership of disaster recovery by up to 50% by decreasing operational expenses through automation and reducing capital investments using SDDC technology
The VMware Storage and Availability solutions team is excited about all the feature enhancements we have for the latest release: SRM 6.1. SRM 6.1 now offers storage policy-based management, integration with VMware NSX and integration with cross-vCenter vMotion when using newly supported stretched storage solutions as underlying replication.
What’s equally exciting is the new addition to the SRM family with the pre-announcement of Site Recovery Manager Air. SRM Air is an all-new orchestration solution for vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, built from the ground up to integrate with our DRaaS offering and to deliver the benefits of hybrid cloud availability and mobility.
Visit the following blogs to learn more about SRM 6.1 and SRM Air:
- VMware Announces Next-Gen Hybrid Cloud Availability and Mobility
- SRM 6.1 What’s New
- Introduction to Site Recovery Manager Air
Calculating the Value of a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Plan
As you debate and ponder about a BC/DR plan, we thought this would be an interesting exercise for you to perform to help you understand the value of having such a plan. Understanding cost of downtime (even if an estimate), allows you to calculate an annualized risk cost for individual services and/or locations and lets you justify the cost of having that insurance policy.
- Revenue losses: Product/service revenue lost from the downtime
- Direct employee cost: Total hourly estimate for all employees who are impacted by the downtime. You can use a ‘probability factor’ for employees who are not entirely shut down
- Indirect employee cost: Nonproductive management time that occurs during downtime
- Payment penalties: Incurred penalties from lack of service
- Regulatory or audit non-compliance: Cost impact of non-compliance
- SLAs: Cost impact of failed Service Level Agreements
- IT recovery costs: Time and expenses needed by the IT staff to restore the system
- Customer complaints: Added employee time to resolve customer complaints
We realize that each business is different and that some of these costs might not be applicable to you, so feel free to customize as needed. Nevertheless, thinking about the aggregated cost of downtime allows you to start having discussions with your management team about having a solid and reliable BC/DR plan.
