Are there any tools for DR testing that are on the market today?
There are no specific tools that I know of that do DR testing, but there are a lot of tools to assist you in the process. For example, if server virtualization is not already part of your production environment, the ability to virtualize servers gives you a chance to test a DR environment that doesn't affect the production environment. It's always a challenge when running a DR test to try and restore data to some system in a meaningful way without affecting your production.
You can't easily turn around and take your production environment down because you're doing a DR test. It's also very costly to put together a physical environment that is a match of your production environment. Server virtualization really gives you an advantage here in the sense that you can create a good test environment without affecting your production environment.
It also gives you a chance to recreate your production environment at a much lower cost. After all, you're trying to run production so it's quite all right to restore a large number of systems on virtual machines to a single system if we're trying to demonstrate that our recovery script works. That's something you can leverage for DR that really gives us an edge here.
Data replication, especially if it's a tool that's already in your environment, is a way to make your testing a lot easier. This of course depends on what it is that you're testing. If you're already replicating data to an offsite location, you're not necessarily leveraging it as a tool for DR testing -- it is your DR strategy. If you're not using it as part of your strategy, that is a good way to transport data without necessarily exposing your original tapes.
Pierre Dorion is the data center practice director and a senior consultant with Long View Systems Inc. in Phoenix, Ariz., specializing in the areas of business continuity and disaster recovery planning services and corporate data protection.
