Ask the Expert: Disaster Recovery Test Preparation and Post Mortem

Your questions are welcome now as the event has began. Let's keep this conversation respectuful and dinamic.

Cheers!

I personally would not pull EMC technical resources into the conversation after the fact, i would prefer to pull EMC business strategists into the discussion of BC/DR. EMC has an array of technologies that provide great DR/BC functionality, my challenge is to get customer to buy those services from me (i am internal IT but still have to "sell" services to businesses). We have never had a Katrina/Sandy so the business has not experienced that pain. As long as we can recover the data from backup they are pretty happy. When you bring EMC in after the fact, the customer is in so much pain that they will tend to overspend, buy technologies they would not be able to integrate with their application/processes. Good for EMC, not so good for customer.

I am curious to hear other people's perspective.

Thanks so much for your input!

In this case, goal is to try to be proactive by pulling in a vendor's technical expert after a DR test to assist with finding and analyzing the root cause of DR test failures.  This technical expert can provide deep product knowledge that may lead to merely tweaking the existing configuration instead of adding more services, software and/or hardware.  This proactive approach can help to ensure a successful recovery in the case of a real disaster.

I welcome more comments!

Christine,

i have always been impressed with EMC technoligies and experties you can bring to the table but when it comes to integration with other vendors that's where i see a lot of finger pointing. So from your experience how do you see vendors playing together when it comes to BC/DR excersices.  Sometimes i hear from vendors ..well we tested DR failover with NetApp but not with EMC ..so you are on your own.

Hi Christine,

Below is a question from Chinese support forum:

Currently EMC focus on its own disaster recovery product functionality and which issue EMC can solve, is there any recommendations from application related and DR process perspective?

A BC/DR solution can consist of several different vendors and initial product integration is key.  Our engineering team puts a lot of effort into testing and qualifying different types of backup solutions that result in our comprehensive compatibility guides.  It has been my experience at EMC that when we are faced with a discussion regarding DR test results and failures, and the customer’s solution includes other vendors; the more productive path to a solution is a collaborative troubleshooting effort.  We sponsor joint conference calls with other vendors and work together to resolve the customer’s issue as well as determine how best to prevent a future occurrence.

A DR plan that requires application failover/recovery needs to be assessed on a case by case basis as all applications behave differently when dealing with failover/failback.  In addition to using an EMC technical expert for assessing BC/DR test failures, it is also recommended to include them in the initial discussions when creating your BC/DR plan.  At that time, each application that would be included in the DR plan could be assessed and the proper solution recommended. 

Here is a link to our product page that lists the various application Data Protection products.

http://www.emc.com/data-protection/index.htm

This Ask the Expert event has concluded. Hoping that you received answers to all of your questions during the 3 week period of this event. At this point we would like to thank you for your participation, but especial thanks goes out to our SME, ctrifoso , for hosting this and other event in the past. Christina, we appreciate you for selflessly taking the time to help our users on ECN!

Stay tuned for more Ask the expert events. See you soon!