Application recovery: Whose job is it anyway?

When it comes to supporting business activities, the primary role ofIT is to ensure that the applications on which the organisation dependsare available and operating at an acceptable level of service. Beyondthis there is the unsung, but absolutely essential, matter ofprotecting both the application and the data it collects, creates andstores over their collective lifetime.Traditionally, more emphasis has been placed on the protection ofdata than applications, with the standard approach being backup totape. This takes time to perform (the ‘backup window’) and, to ensuredata consistency, it often requires that access to the data besuspended while the backup takes place.
This can be quite a challenge, particularly for transactionalapplications (i.e. most of them) – it requires stopping the applicationprogram, getting all transactions to complete and then initiating theprotection process. Once completed, the application is restarted andthereafter the users can begin to use the software again as part oftheir business processes.When recovery of data is required, the reverse process would takeplace with administrators seeking to restore data sets from one or moretapes. Both of these processes can take a considerable amount of time,even in the best of cases.Today’s pressures for data to be available for longer have putadditional constraints on the backup window, at the same time asreinforcing the need to recover data quickly. As a consequence, anumber of alternative technologies have sprung up for use in dataprotection and recovery processes. These include backing up to disk,Continuous Data Protection Systems (CDP), point-in-time copies(snapshots), and replication solutions. Each of these offers differentcapabilities and will be suited to a range of data protection scenarios.Despite these advances, the application still needs to be in alogically consistent state prior to the data protection processcommencing, both to enable a recovery process to be operated and toleave users in a position to carry on work.Today it is becoming unacceptable to bring down some applications toallow a backup, snapshot or replication process to take place, soanother means must be found to ensure that a self-consistent data setis protected. This challenge is becoming further exacerbated ascomplex, composite applications are used that may run using data frommultiple systems, some of which may extend beyond the borders of theenterprise.This raises the question: who is responsible for ensuringapplication and data consistency in data protection and recoveryscenarios? As applications become more complex architecturally, and inline with business demands for high availability, IT infrastructureadministrators and application developers/implementation consultantsneed to find ways to work together to ensure that rapid applicationprotection and recoverability are built into systems right from theword go.From our research, we know how much of a challenge this can be. In a study conductedlast year,it became clear just how much of a gamble organisations were preparedto take with the reliability of their IT systems. But more recent workhas shown us the gulf between different factions in IT, which can onlyexacerbate the situation. We’re not going to attempt glib answers -although if you have any, do let us know – but we can say that all thetools in the world won’t help if the right pieces aren’t being put inplace from the outset.Where to start? Probably the developers themselves, who will need toknow what the data protection/recovery solution needs from it so thatthe storage administrators can ensure that the desired quality ofservice is achieved with minimum risk and, naturally, the minimum ofcost. It’s time to make the planning for recoverability an integralpart of the system design and build process, and development is as gooda place to start as any.

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