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A good business-continuity strategy 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.
DR risks 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 all users and jeopardize the future of the business.
The essential elements of DR are commonplace, dependable, cost-effective, and easy to implement. They address or prevent events that are most likely to occur. These protections might include moving key workloads to a cloud provider, 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.
PowerStoreOS 4.0 extends Metro Volume support to include Windows Server and Hyper-V (2016 and newer). To learn more about Metro Volume support for Windows Server and Hyper-V with PowerStoreOS 4.0, see the white paper Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume on the Dell PowerStore Info Hub.
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 options to protect, move, replicate, and recover data using snapshots, thin clones, and replications. PowerStoreOS 4.0 extends Metro Volume support to Microsoft environments. This section addresses key disaster recovery and avoidance concepts that should be integral to business continuity planning with PowerStore and Hyper-V.