IT resilience means keeping applications available to serve the needs of the business with no or limited interruption. But how do you ensure your organization’s resiliency?
An often-overlooked step in a business’ resiliency strategy is rehearsals. Just like preparing for a test or presentation, practicing your resiliency strategy will give you confidence you are meeting compliance requirements and ensuring your critical business systems are always available and recoverable.
Rehearsals are non-disruptive simulations of your production environment that help guarantee your disaster recovery readiness in the event of a disaster. And, for some organizations in regulated industries such as health care, financial services, and the government sector, a disaster recovery plan may be required by law.
With the Veritas NetBackup Resiliency Platform, we have simplified how IT organizations can automate and orchestrate disaster recovery (DR), resiliency, and system migrations while meeting service level objectives. With a single, intuitive management console, all backup, recovery, and disaster recovery activities are unified to provide and enforce consistent policies and service levels across the enterprise.
The key values of the NetBackup Resiliency Platform are:
- Broad Infrastructure Support: supports physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure with a choice of data movers, including native and 3rd party technologies.
- Recover business applications quickly: assign different recovery priorities across applications tiers to recover multi-tier apps to active status in the appropriate sequence and business criticality.
- Data Integrity: orchestrate sequenced shut-down and start-up to recover workloads and dependencies as a single entity.
- Unified Visibility: centralize management across on-premise and cloud platforms with views tailored to global applications, virtual machines, resiliency groups, and virtual business services.
- Integration with VMware Ecosystems: integrates into VMware ecosystems protecting the value of VMware without compromising resiliency.
- Automation of runbooks: converts automated runbooks into automated resiliency plans or blueprints delivering reduced recovery time and point objectives.
- Non-Disruptive Simulations: automate rehearsals to simulate non-disruptive recovery procedures across entire data center(s), applications, or virtual machines; further, meet audit compliance and prove value of the solution to the business.
In this tutorial video, we demonstrate how you can create your resiliency plan and rehearse the recovery of a multi-tier application using NetBackup Resiliency, including how to:
- Organize your workloads into Resiliency Groups (RG). In the video, I RGs can be created for any of your servers, including Apache Web server, Web server, NGINX Load Balancers, Oracle Database & WebLogic application server.
- Easily define the start/stop order in which each tier is brought up by the application simply by dragging and dropping the RGs to the corresponding tier. This can be a one-time (“set and forget”) configuration.
- Launch the single-click rehearsal workflow once your resiliency plan using Virtual Business Services (VBS) and/or resiliency groups has been configured. This will start the workflow of activities configured for each Resiliency Group in the sequence in which the VBS are defined.
- Test your application on your DR site once the workflow finishes.
- And finally, once the rehearsal is complete, run the cleanup workflow to remove the environment created during the rehearsal. The environment is now ready for the next cycle—or rehearsal.
Practicing your disaster recovery plan is an important step in any IT resiliency strategy. With NetBackup Resiliency, we’re simplifying resiliency planning with rehearsals that not only save on IT costs, but also help to assure disaster preparedness; identify and eliminate vulnerability gaps; and maintain IT service level expectations.
Learn more about NetBackup Resiliency Platform: https://www.veritas.com/availability/resiliency-platform
