Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

A new study from CPU maker, AMD, shows that over one third, 37%, of companies are now using cloud infrastructure for their data centers with an additional 43% of companies investigating implementation. And this isn’t just small companies who are relying on the power of cloud technology, with 63% of those using the cloud saying that they have data stored in there worth over $250,000, meaning billions of dollars worth of information is now sitting securely off-site.

Cloud computing has been growing over the past couple of years, and has increased with the wide spread of virtualization allowing companies to scale their IT department easier and more efficiently. 1 in 10 companies are now storing over 10 million dollars in the cloud now, but there is still concerns from security experts who point out that are still some flaws that have come to light recently with companies like Sony having their servers hacked and Amazon’s cloud service going down for an extended period of time leaving many companies unable to access their information. While security was still sited as the number one concern when moving to a cloud infrastructure, these flaws in the cloud computing model haven’t deterred companies from moving to the cloud, having the benefits of accessing their information from anywhere and allowing companies to outsource certain IT tasks to an outside company.

Are your backups taking too long? How often do you test them, and are you sure they would restore properly when you need them? The problem with most disaster recovery solutions is there is no middle ground for SMB’s (Small Medium Businesses). Large corporations can invest in complex virtualization strategies using technology from VMware, this is a great option, but companies with limited IT support or who don’t have the funds to invest in virtualizing their servers are stuck with strategies that don’t give them the support they need. Many are forced to continue using Tape as a backup solution, which has a notorious reputation of not being able to restore. Others rely on having a RAID array, giving them the benefit of allowing a hard drive to crash without losing data, which does give them some security, but only in that one respect. If the server were to die the data would be fine but wouldn’t be assessable until the server was back up and running. This leaves SMB’s with old outdated and extremely limited Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans that don’t even come close to the benefits that virtualization gives the larger corporations.

NSI’s main target audience has always SMB’s and having seen the gap in technology brought its technicians together to create the ZoomBox. The ZoomBox is an NSI ran and owned product that gives SMB’s the virtualization protection that their business needs without having to change their entire network. What happens is NSI installs a client on any Windows machine that the customer wants to ensure up time and data protection. The ZoomBox then creates virtual images of each server/desktop 1-3 times a day, this image is then backed up to the cloud for extra protection, ensuring that all your data is perfectly safe regardless of what might happen to your business environment.

Is a server crash not an option for your company? Is having your server up and running the life and soul of your business? Then you may want to consider VMware’s Fault Tolerance (FT) feature. VMware Fault Tolerance is a step up from VMware High Availability (HA), with High Availability being VMware’s backup for a VM crash, if a server running a VM happens to go down then the host reboots on a different host. This allows for only a minute or two of downtime as the Virtual Machine starts up on a new server and the primary host that has crashed is restarted, if possible. This is extremely useful and can keep a business functioning with only a moment of downtime. What Fault Tolerance does is eliminate that couple minutes of downtime so that even if a server crashes, nothing is felt by the user. This feature gives companies that can’t stop functioning, even for a minute, the security they need to run their businesses.

How does FT work? Well with HA there is a primary server who runs the VM and a dedicated secondary host that is there in case of failure, if/when that failure occurs the secondary host is started and the VM is restarted on the new host. The failure is detected by using VMware’s heartbeat function that pings the server every second to ensure it is still active on the network, if the host stops responding it is considered to have failed and the VMs are moved to a new machine.  FT continues this trend, but instead of waiting for a host to fail and then restart it uses vLockstep to keep both hosts in sync that way if one was to fail than the other would continue running without having the user notice the server failure. By sharing a virtualized storage, all the files are accessible to both hosts and the primary host updates the secondary host constantly in order to keep both hosts RAM in sync. FT has a few rules to ensure it works properly:

• Hosts must be in an HA cluster
• Primary and secondary VMs must run on different hosts
• Anti- affinity must be enabled (A configuration that ensures that the VM cannot be started on the same host)
• The VMs must be stored on a shared storage
• Minimum of 2 Gbps Nics, this is to allow vMotion and FT logging
• Additional NICs for VM and management network traffic

If you missed it, Check out Part 1 on setting up your DR Plan

Setting up your team