Is automation killing the engineering? When MTV first appeared on air, the first video it played was, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Fast forward a few decades and I have to wonder if automation is killing the engineering. In the early days of virtualization the administrators were expected to be proficient via the command line and to be honest if you wanted to really understand how things worked, command line administration was an absolute must have skill. Virtualization has evolved from those early days with more and more features and services getting added to the infrastructure that the need for the vast command line skills seem to be fading as the technology continues to mature. Looking forward where cloud computing is working to achieve complete and total automation, I have to wonder how administrators will handle the stress of getting issues resolved when automation is not an option.
TVP Tag Archives
Virtualizing Business Critical Applications: Data Protection
A major aspect of virtualizing any business critical application is data protection which encompasses not only backup, but disaster recovery, and business continuity. It is imperative that our data be protected. While this is true of all workloads, it becomes a bigger concern when virtualizing business critical applications. Not only do we need backups, but we need to protect the business, which is where business continuity comes into play.
Move to the Cloud: Wait Out the Storm
Move to the Cloud could be the simple choice of providing as needed DR capability, but always remember the cloud is not the data owner and therefore not responsible for your data, so you must get it “There and Back Again”
Data Protection is NOT just about Backup
Data Protection is not just about backup these days, but instead concentrates on two all important concepts for a business: disaster recovery and business continuity. While backup is a part of Disaster Recovery, restoration is all important. If it is not possible to restore your data in a timely fashion the backup has failed. So technologies that allow us to access our data immediately provides a level of business continuity. But how is this achieved? So where do you save your critical data is is readily restorable? Is your backup integrated into your monitoring software? Have you tested your restore today?
Life without the Cloud or Reasons to use a Hybrid Cloud
The Virtualization Practice was recently offline for two days, we thank you for coming back to us after this failure. The reason, a simple fibre cut that would have taken the proper people no more than 15 minutes to fix, but we were way down on the list due to the nature of the storm that hit New England and took 3M people off the grid. Even our backup mechanisms were out of power. While our datacenter had power, the rest of the area in our immediate vicinity did not. So not only were we isolated from reaching any clouds, but we were isolated from being reached from outside our own datacenter. The solution to such isolation is usually remote sites and location of services in other regions of a county, this gets relatively expensive for small and medium business, can the Hybrid Cloud help here?
Replication Round-up
Whether you use replication as a means of disaster avoidance or disaster recovery, replication of your virtual environment between hot sites has always been a win. With current technology it is even possible to replicate to a replication receiver cloud which could provide a measure of business continuity as well. So who are the players and who provides what service, and how do they do it?