Who are the major players in the failover/failback operations space?
All of the major vendors have solutions and various mechanisms even exist at the post-operating system level and from backup vendors. I would go to your major solution provider partners and talk to them about their recommended approaches.
One other important aspect of failover and failback to consider is the assessment of whether your services are appropriately configured for synchronization and complete startup of a recovery environment. In general, the IT practitioner has relied heavily on the manual testing of failover and failback. But that exercise is surrounded with poor assumptions.
You're assuming that your prep for the exercise will help you mitigate issues that you would face during an unpredictable disaster. But there are discussions with end users that these exercises are often riddled with holes and failures or compromises. As a result, we're seeing an increasing number of vendors bring solutions to the table that will more holistically manage or evaluate the DR environment, including Simple Continuous and Continuity Software. These focus on managing your DR environment and setup, ongoing preservation and identifying what might be out of spec so that you can correct or automate mitigation of issues that might pop up.
Those solutions, in my view, are disruptive to the marketplace this year. They will have tremendous traction with end users and solve some big issues in large enterprises. But the value proposition is all the way down the food chain for small businesses that have a fairly complex environment to manage DR for.
Jeff Boles is a Senior Analyst with the Taneja Group.
