PowerStore provides Hyper-V administrators with many options to protect, move, archive, and recover data given a disaster recovery (DR) or disaster-avoidance scenario. In addition to the integrated redundancies with PowerStore architecture, administrators can use snapshots, thin clones, replication, and Metro Volume in creative ways to ensure business continuity.
Unplanned events
Unplanned DR events cause downtime with little or no warning. DR events can be categorized as follows:
- Data loss: Malware infection, corruption, accidental deletion, sabotage, storage hardware failure, and so forth.
- PowerStore snapshots and replication to a remote site are an important part of a recovery plan in these scenarios.
- The redundancies built into PowerStore and Hyper-V, combined with a robust storage fabric that uses MPIO, can reduce risks associated with hardware failures.
- Access interruption: Network failure or power failure (no data loss)
- Redundant data paths help maintain connectivity to sites, between sites, and within the data center.
Redundant power sources protect against a short-term or long-term power loss.
- Major events: Events that result in data loss, hardware loss, and loss of site access, such as a fire or natural disaster.
- Configure another site that can serve as a backup for critical workloads.
- Use a cloud-based solution to host critical workloads and data if you do not have an alternate location for DR.
Planned events
Planned events cause down time but allow administrators lead time to invoke a disaster avoidance plan that avoids or limits business impact. Leverage Metro Volume to protect against downtime when you have a planned event. See the white paper Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume on the Dell PowerStore Info Hub to learn more.
- Maintenance: Planned power outage, hardware upgrades, software upgrades, and so forth.
- Fail critical workloads over to another PowerStore appliance at the same site or a different site.
- Keep noncritical workloads in place but schedule down time when it will not be service impacting.
- Leverage native Microsoft tools, PowerStore snapshots, replications, Metro Volume with failover/failback technology to ensure business continuity.
- Weather: For example, when a hurricane approaches, coastal locations usually have enough lead time to invoke a predefined disaster avoidance plan.
- Schedule periodic testing to ensure that the execution of a disaster avoidance plan goes smoothly.
- A failover site should be geographically distant so it is unaffected by the same weather event.
A good business continuity plan anticipates disaster recovery and disaster avoidance scenarios, with strategies to ensure business continuity for the most likely events. These strategies should use a combination of manual and automatic processes to address the widest range of scenarios that is feasible within the budget.