Section 3 : Business Continuity

Introduction to Business Continuity

Chapter 11

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Chapter Objective
After completing this chapter, you will be able to: o Define Business Continuity and Information Availability

o Detail impact of information unavailability

o Define BC measurement and terminologies o Describe BC planning process o Detail BC technology solutions

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What is Business Continuity (BC)

o Business Continuity is preparing for, responding to, and recovering from an application outage that adversely affects business operations o Business Continuity solutions address unavailability and degraded application performance o Business Continuity is an integrated and enterprise wide process and set of activities to ensure information availability

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What is Information Availability (IA)

o IA refers to the ability of an infrastructure to function according to business expectations during its specified time of operation o IA can be defined in terms of three parameters:
o Reliability
o The components delivering the information should be able to function without failure, under stated conditions, for a specified amount of time

o Accessibility
o Information should be accessible at the right place and to the right user

o Timeliness
o Information must be available whenever required

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Causes of Information Unavailability

Disaster (<1% of Occurrences) Natural or man made
Flood, fire, earthquake Contaminated building

Unplanned Outages (20%) Failure

Database corruption Component failure Human error

Planned Outages (80%) Competing workloads

Backup, reporting Data warehouse extracts Application and data restore

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Impact of Downtime
Lost Productivity Number of employees impacted (x hours out * hourly rate)
Know the downtime costs (per hour, day, two days...)

Lost Revenue Direct loss Compensatory payments Lost future revenue Billing losses Investment losses

Damaged Reputation Customers Suppliers Financial markets Banks Business partners

Financial Performance Revenue recognition Cash flow Lost discounts (A/P) Payment guarantees Credit rating Stock price

Other Expenses Temporary employees, equipment rental, overtime costs, extra shipping costs, travel expenses...
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Impact of Downtime
o Average cost of downtime per hour = average productivity loss per hour + average revenue loss per hour o Where: o Productivity loss per hour = (total salaries and benefits of all employees per week) / (average number of working hours per week) o Average revenue loss per hour = (total revenue of an organization per week) / (average number of hours per week that an organizations is open for business)

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Measuring Information Availability

MTTR Time to repair or downtime

Response Time

Recovery Time

Detection

Repair

Restoration

Incident

Diagnosis

Recovery

Time Incident

Detection elapsed time

Repair time

MTBF Time between

failures or uptime

o MTBF: Average time available for a system or component to perform its normal operations between failures o MTTR: Average time required to repair a failed component

IA = MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR) or IA = uptime / (uptime + downtime)

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Availability Measurement Levels of 9s Availability

% Uptime % Downtime Downtime per Year Downtime per Week

98% 99% 99.8%

2% 1% 0.2%

7.3 days 3.65 days 17 hrs 31 min

3hrs 22 min 1 hr 41 min 20 min 10 sec

99.9%
99.99%

0.1%
0.01%

8 hrs 45 min
52.5 min

10 min 5 sec
1 min

99.999%
99.9999%
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0.001%
0.0001%

5.25 min
31.5 sec

6 sec
0.6 sec

BC Terminologies
o Disaster recovery
o Coordinated process of restoring systems, data, and infrastructure required to support ongoing business operations in the event of a disaster o Restoring previous copy of data and applying logs to that copy to bring it to a known point of consistency o Generally implies use of backup technology

o Disaster restart
o Process of restarting from disaster using mirrored consistent copies of data and applications o Generally implies use of replication technologies

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BC Terminologies (Cont.)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) o Point in time to which systems and data must be recovered after an outage o Amount of data loss that a business can endure Recovery Time Objective (RTO) o Time within which systems, applications, or functions must be recovered after an outage o Amount of downtime that a business can endure and survive

Weeks Days Hours

Tape Backup Periodic Replication Asynchronous Replication

Weeks

Tape Restore Disk Restore Manual Migration

Days
Hours Minutes

Minutes Seconds

Synchronous Replication

Seconds

Global Cluster

Recovery-point objective
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Recovery-time objective

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) Process

o Identifying the critical business functions o Collecting data on various business processes within those functions o Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
o Risk Analysis
o Assessing, prioritizing, mitigating, and managing risk

o Designing and developing contingency plans and disaster recovery plan (DR Plan)

o Testing, training and maintenance

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Business Continuity (BC) Planning Lifecycle

BC planning must follow a disciplined approach like any other planning process. Organizations today dedicate specialized resources to develop and maintain BC plans. From the conceptualization to the realization of the BC plan, a lifecycle of activities can be defined for the BC process. The BC planning lifecycle includes five stages:
1. Establishing objectives 2. Analyzing 3. Designing and developing 4. Implementing 5. Training, testing, assessing, and maintaining

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Business Continuity (BC) Planning Lifecycle

Figure. BC planning lifecycle

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Establishing objectives
o Determine BC requirements.

o Estimate the scope and budget to achieve requirements.

o Select a BC team by considering subject matter experts from all areas of the business, whether internal or external. o Create BC policies.

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Analyzing
o Collect information on data profiles, business processes, infrastructure support, dependencies, and frequency of using business infrastructure. o Identify critical business needs and assign recovery priorities.

o Create a risk analysis for critical areas and mitigation strategies.

o Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). o Create a cost and benefit analysis based on the consequences of data unavailability. o Evaluate options.
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Designing and developing

o Define the team structure and assign individual roles and responsibilities. For example, different teams are formed for activities such as emergency response, damage assessment, and infrastructure and application recovery. o Design data protection strategies and develop infrastructure. o Develop contingency scenarios. o Develop emergency response procedures. o Detail recovery and restart procedures.

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Implementing
o Implement risk management and mitigation procedures that include backup, replication, and management of resources. o Prepare the disaster recovery sites that can be utilized if a disaster affects the primary data center.

o Implement redundancy for every resource in a data center to avoid single points of failure.

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Training, testing, assessing, and maintaining

o Train the employees who are responsible for backup and replication of business-critical data on a regular basis or whenever there is a modification in the BC plan. o Train employees on emergency response procedures when disasters are declared.

o Train the recovery team on recovery procedures based on contingency scenarios.

o Perform damage assessment processes and review recovery plans.

o Test the BC plan regularly to evaluate its performance and identify its limitations.
o Assess the performance reports and identify limitations. o Update the BC plans and recovery/restart procedures to reflect regular changes within the data center.
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BC Technology Solutions
o The following are the solutions and supporting technologies that enable business continuity and uninterrupted data availability:
o Fault tolerant configuration
o To avoid single-point of failure

o Multi-pathing software o Backup and replication

o Backup recovery o Local replication o Remote replication

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Implementation of Fault Tolerance

Clustered Servers Heartbeat Connection Redundant Ports Redundant Arrays

Client

FC Switches

IP
Storage Array Storage Array Remote Site Redundant Network

Redundant Paths Redundant FC Switches

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Multi-pathing Software
o Configuration of multiple paths increases data availability o Even with multiple paths, if a path fails I/O will not reroute unless system recognizes that it has an alternate path o Multi-pathing software helps to recognize and utilizes alternate I/O path to data

o Multi-pathing software also provide the load balancing

o Load balancing improves I/O performance and data path utilization

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Backup and Replication

o Local Replication
o Data from the production devices is copied to replica devices within the same array o The replicas can then be used for restore operations in the event of data corruption or other events

o Remote Replication
o Data from the production devices is copied to replica devices on a remote array o In the event of a failure, applications can continue to run from the target device

o Backup/Restore
o Backup to tape has been a predominant method to ensure business continuity o Frequency of backup is depend on RPO/RTO requirements
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Chapter Summary
Key points covered in this chapter: o Importance of Business Continuity

o Types of outages and their impact to businesses

o Information availability measurements o Definitions of disaster recovery and restart, RPO and RTO o Business Continuity technology solutions overview

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Check Your Knowledge

o Which concerns do business continuity solutions address? o Availability is expressed in terms of 9s. Explain the relevance of the use of 9s for availability, using examples. o What is the difference between RPO and RTO? o What is the difference between Disaster Recovery and Disaster Restart? o Provide examples of planned and unplanned downtime in the context of storage infrastructure operations. o What are some of the Single Points of Failure in a typical data center environment?

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