Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/549869
www.datacenterjournal.com 2. Employ built-in failover testing. To ensure the IT team is truly prepared for a disaster, Avondale wanted to conduct periodic tests of its cloud-based replicated environment without having to worry about extravagant costs. "You hope that everything is there, and you've managed it well, and you've done your test restores. Our vendor, the product selected and IT partners pro- vided it to us. ey built for that exercise so that they could prove it at the end and on an ongoing basis." 3. Meet recovery objectives. Recognizing the critical importance of having the most current data, Avondale worked with its vendor to set a maximum three-hour RPO for important services. Also, establishing SLAs around availabil- ity of resources and powering on virtual machines during an operational disruption were important aspects of the service that helped drive the city's decision to pinpoint the best solution for its needs. "Disaster recovery is important to the city and to any organization, but specifically to government. When government fails, traffic stops being well managed; police don't arrive; fire fight- ers don't arrive. en, it gets to what are our core assumptions about how a community works and people are at risk. So, in terms of our urgency, it's life and death for a lot of what we do." 4. Implement disaster recovery at an affordable rate. Avondale has a responsibility to its residents to provide services, but it's also beholden to a local-government budget. Lloyd wanted to find the best service at the best rate, and he felt that the solution the city selected consistently offered a comfort- able level of assurance at a price that worked with its budget. 5. Prepare for the future. e city of Avondale plans to expand its network-segmentation protection and is currently piloting a platform to improve perimeter management and increase secu- rity layers to improve protection. "We want to manage our network in a way that's more nimble, but also more secure and without needing as much hardware and personnel time." Deciding to build on its familiar- ity with existing technology and tools, the Avondale IT team's choice allows it to restore city services as quickly and securely as possible, greatly improving the city's re- siliency at an affordable, scalable rate. Lloyd recognizes that these decisions mean more than the end goal: "Internally, IT develops more credibility when we are accomplishing great things with departments, so that's what we build around. It's not to sell ourselves. It's to be responsive and to hear what the orga- nization needs. To create a very clear and effective IT vision and strategy around that." How does today's hybrid cloud enhance the traditional DC without being a threat? Maintaining exact duplicates of equipment and application configurations continues to have disadvantages, espe- cially in terms of cost, time and flexibility. Forrester has estimated that less than five percent of applications are protected by DR because of the cost and complexity. With hybrid cloud, the simplicity and much lower costs means far more applica- tions can be protected. Disaster recovery– as–a–service (DRaaS) eliminates the need to duplicate infrastructure at a secondary or tertiary site. As we've seen with the city of Avon- dale, using hybrid cloud for DR allows organizations to maintain business continu- ity with their existing applications, staff and data while adding agility and flexibility. Working with the vendor's staff and solu- tion-provider IT partners, the city success- fully designed, tested and launched a new DR strategy in less than three months. As a result, it has established an active backup en- vironment in another state with replication. Avondale's IT staff can take advantage of built-in test features for routine background failover testing to validate business-resump- tion capacity for business lines and auditors. It can fix traffic jams and restore emergency services such as police, EMS and fire, saving time—and even lives—in the process, and proving how life-changing the right DR system can be. n about the author: Mathew Lodge is vice president of cloud services at VMware. It's no secret that FAAST aspirating smoke detectors watch over your important assets and prevent downtime. But here's something you may not know: FAAST is now available in three different varieties to accommodate any coverage area. Whether you need to protect a small space or a large space, FAAST has a solution for you! Meet the FAAST family of aspirating smoke detectors. With the addition of FAAST XS for smaller applications, our family of aspirating smoke detectors has grown. With the same look, functionality, and technology, FAAST can meet all application needs. Meet the new addition, FAAST XS, at: go.systemsensor.com/ FAASTXS-DCJ ©2015 System Sensor. All Rights Reserved. There's another one?