Today’s organisations are looking for faster, more efficient and flexible solutions than traditional migration and disaster recovery services are able to offer. Set out below is a summary of what we believe constitute essential requirements for machine migration and recovery, the technologies we use, some important considerations and more on the operational benefits that Dagda delivers.

Essential Requirements for Machine Migration & Recovery

• All machines need to be replicated with regard to System State i.e. operating system (o/s), applications and data in real time. The target location for the replicated data has to be other than the source location i.e. other machine(s)/storage either physical and/or virtual. In addition, for recovery purposes, it is desirable to replicate to a different location – whether that be a different site, town, city, country or even continent.
• All data as defined above should be consistent (in other words recoverable) with regard to individual machine(s) and across machine relationships.
• Machines should be automatically archived at consistent time points at the local site and recovery site(s).
• Automatic recovery of machines will then be available:
1. From archive generation groups. This enables the facility to restore from prior checkpoint(s).
2. From current live point in time (o/s, applications and data).
3. All of the above from any or all selected locations.

The points raised above always hold true.

How NBC Delivers these Essential Requirements

• Replication software – NBC has selected and uses replication software which operates asynchronously in real-time and replicates operating systems, applications and data (by logical block) over LAN, WAN and IP. It works in multiple server and storage architectures and supports multiple operating systems – including Windows, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Solaris. It ensures consistency of data at any secondary site and is capable of supporting one to many replication scenarios. This capability is an essential requirement for any recovery plan because it means that mission critical systems can be recovered quickly and efficiently at more than one site if the primary site is unavailable for any reason.
• Archiving software – NBC has selected and uses Acronis True Image Server. This software gives Dagda two headline capabilities as follows. Firstly, the capability to recover files, folders and volumes direct from the desktop. Secondly, the capability to support any existing archiving regime whether that be daily, weekly or monthly etc.
• NBC has developed Dagda to harness replication, archiving, virtualisation and storage (locally attached as well as SAN/NAS storage). Dagda has built in automated procedures to enable the migration and recovery of source machines (both physical and virtual) to target machines (both physical and virtual).

Important Considerations

• In order to achieve guaranteed recovery of machines and data, duplicate copies of all essential data to run systems must be replicated from the source machine(s) / storage and “lifted” (synchronised) to target machine(s) / storage held at other location(s).
• The first initial “lift” (synchronisation) of system state and data must be made. After the initial lift of data all subsequent changes made by users on the source machines are transmitted at block level over IP to the Target machine(s) at the relevant sites.
• The upside of virtualisation is that many machines occupy the same foot print. However, the risk of hardware failure increases the losses that will be incurred on an exponential scale. Therefore, it is more important than ever to observe the above rules to avoid such a scenario. VMware, VMotion & High Availability does not achieve disaster recovery of machines (VMware make no claims as to this). The apparent ease of producing clones of machines can give the illusion of disaster recovery. Automatic recovery of machines at the point in time of disaster, can only be achieved by products as we have described.

Operational benefits of Dagda:

• Full Disaster Recovery of guaranteed consistent machines/applications, achieved by a simple push button mechanism, in approximately 15 minutes, regardless of size (megabytes to terabytes). Read more...
• Migration:
• Virtualisation – Dagda automates procedures required to migrate physical machines to virtual machines. The savings are immediate (i.e. divide costs by up to 32). Read more...
• Hardware Refresh (Servers – P2V, P2P, V2V and V2P)
  1. Dagda’s in-built procedures enable automatic transfer of System State (o/s) applications and data to new state of the art hardware. Read more...
• Storage (local, SAN, NAS, ISCI/Fibre NFS)
1. Dagda’s in-built procedures enable automatic transfer of all data from any type of storage to any type of storage. Read more...
• Testing new versions of o/s and or application software, away from the live environment.
• Regular testing of recovery procedures at your own convenience.
• Offline virus checking.

NBC believe that Dagda is the best solution to harness all required procedures to achieve both migration and recoverability of machines. Additionally, Dagda solves all the salient problems at an affordable price, for small to large enterprise companies.