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A good business-continuity strategy always incorporates disaster recovery (DR) and disaster avoidance planning. A DR plan ensures that a company can recover as quickly as possible from data loss or from an interruption or failure preventing access to data. It is an important part of the overall IT strategy.
The DR scenarios that might be encountered are diverse and might vary by location. Disasters can be small or large. The loss of a single document that impacts one user is a disaster for that user. If not resolved quickly, a site failure might impact many users and jeopardize the future of the business.
The essential elements of DR are now commonplace, reliable, cost-effective, and easy to implement. They address or prevent most events that are most likely to occur. These protections might include moving key workloads to a cloud provider, or making tape backups with offsite storage, online backups, or disk-to-disk backups. Safeguards can also include network and physical security measures, malware protection, and redundant hardware and Internet connections. Also, DR can include SAN-based snapshots with remote replication, and battery backups or generators.
Business continuity becomes more complicated and costly with the size and number of locations. While virtualization technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V can help ensure continuity in a disaster, they can also add complexity to the overall design.
PowerStore provides Hyper-V administrators with several options to protect, move, replicate, and recover data using snapshots, thin clones, and replications. Several practical day-to-day use cases and scenarios were described previously. This section addresses key disaster recovery and avoidance concepts that should be integral to business continuity planning with PowerStore and Hyper-V.