Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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The level of automation will vary depending on the task being addressed, the criticality of the application and data, and other factors necessary to meet a given level of service. For example, some levels of service may need more automation and tighter integration across different technology domains or technology-specific policy engines, while other tiers may involve a combination of automated and manual intervention.
Automation needs to extend horizontally across different technology domains and functions to support application-wide BC and DR. What to automate, together with when and where to automate, will depend on the application and business service requirements. Basically, you want to automate the tasks that occur most often, such as host bus adapter (HBA) path failover, server failover in a cluster, disk drive rebuild, and the coordination of updates and replication across different locations.
Determining what and where to automate involves assessing and classifying application and business service requirements, including recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Another part of the assessment process entails classifying the various applications and their accompanying data to establish the level of BC and DR an application and its data requires. A principal foundation for automated BC and DR is to leverage fault-containment and fault-isolation configuration practices. In other words, eliminate single points of failure using
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redundant design principles that enable automated and transparent fault isolation and containment to avoid rolling disasters. For example, dual HBAs with automated path failover managers can isolate and contain faults from spreading into a larger disaster.
This was first published in August 2006
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