Recovering your data in the event of a catastrophic failure

Have you ever sat down and really thought about how you would recover your data in the event of a catastrophic failure? You backup everything though, don’t you? Worst case scenario, you can restore everything from your backups, right?

It all sounds very simple and straightforward to get things back to “business as normal”. In practice however, this is rarely the case unfortunately. Have you thought about how quickly you could provision new servers to restore your data onto? Have you thought about the possibility of having to relocate your systems to an alternative datacentre? Have you really thought about the length of time it could take to restore your systems to a fully working state? Do you have a DR plan or runbook that details a complete list of steps it would take you to get business back to normal following every possible disaster scenario? Realistically, how long could all this take? Days? Weeks? Possibly longer? How would the business function without its IT systems?

When you stop and think about all of this in detail, it becomes apparent that in most cases a simple backup routine is not enough to effectively protect your systems from a disaster. Backups can complement a disaster recovery solution but should never be a complete substitute for one.

The good news is that virtualised systems can be a lot easier to protect from disasters than physical servers. Virtualised systems are made up of a collection of files so relocating a server can often be as simple as copying files to a new location.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager not only helps us copy these files to a second location but allows us to fully manage everything which would need to be done if your primary systems became unavailable for any reason.

But Site Recovery manager is expensive, right? We would need twice the amount of hardware that we currently have. Well, probably not. Do you really need to protect those 40 test servers and get them back online immediately? Again probably not. Would you really need to instantly recover the development team’s 60 servers or could they realistically wait a few days to be restored from backups. In reality, how many of your systems are truly “business critical”? Which of your servers could the business really not function without? When you think about it like this, your recovery site could possibly just contain a couple of relatively inexpensive virtualised servers along with a fraction of your primary storage capacity, protecting only your key systems. You may choose to take advantage of “vSphere Replication”, which is included at no additional charge with most vSphere licenses, eliminating the need for extremely high speed links between sites and removing the need for identical expensive, high-end storage at your recovery site.

One of the most compelling features of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is the ability to fully test and demonstrate the DR process with absolutely no impact on production systems. Testing results can be saved and used to demonstrate to the business, compliance with disaster recovery requirements. Knowing for a fact that your DR plan has been fully tested and really works is an extremely comforting thing for a business to know.

Malcolm Smith - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

Power 7+ Taking Power Systems to the Next Level by Neil Hulme

Power 7+ was first introduced late last year on the enterprise class p770 and p780 servers with a new model designation of MMD. IBM has always offered a consistent roadmap, so just as before with Power 5 and Power 6 any new “plus chip” always offers a bump in performance with higher clock speeds. In this case up from 3.5 to 4.3 GHz. What is not immediately obvious, but just as significant, is a massive increase in L3 cache from 4MB on Power 7 to 10MB per core on Power 7+. The bigger cache means more of the data can be stored on the chip close to the CPU cores, which helps to speed-up operations significantly. Overall we are getting an average 25% increase in performance based on IBM published rPerf performance figures.

 

Unless you were looking at buying an IBM enterprise class power system at the end of 2012, this would have largely passed by unnoticed. That is until recently as IBM has started to roll out the new p7+ processor across its mid-range and entry-level power boxes.

 

The p750 was the first of the Power7 released in 2010 and was the platform used for Watson. For those of you who do not remember, Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of processing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and was famously used to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy. This system gets a p7+ update that includes a much needed integrated split backplane and gen2 PCI slots. Dimensions wise it is also slightly larger now and comes in a 5U form factor from the previous 4U. The p760 is a new Power 7+ system that joins the range and is the smallest system in the enterprise range to support capacity upgrade on demand.

 

There are also new p710 and p730 express models giving you this enterprise class chip performance in a 2U entry level system footprint. It is also pretty clear that IBM sees x86 Linux systems as its main competition at this end of the power systems range by offering comparable pricing to level the playing field. Also, IBM is offering more competitive pricing on the p720 and p740 Power 7+ systems.

 

What is also significant with this increase in horsepower is that Power 7+ takes the PowerVM technology and moves it forwards with 20 LPARs per cores giving greater granularity for server consolidation.

 

It is always important to look at the required software versions when integrating new power models into an existing power estate. From an AIX perspective the IBM Power 7+ will require AIX V7.1 TL02: Service Pack 2 or later, AIX V6.1 TL08: Service Pack 2 or later or AIX V6.1 TL07: Service Pack 7 or later and a minimum HMC version of V7 R760 and VIO Server version 2.2.2.2.

 

You can find out more about the new Power 7+ servers or the comparable x86 pricing for Power 710 and Power 730 servers by contacting your Celerity Representive.

 

 

 

 

Windows 8 Over Windows 7 by Mark Fidler

Microsoft‘s new operating system has so much more to offer than its predecessors, both for the home user and business user alike. Microsoft has taken notice of the trend of consumers going down the route of buying a tablet rather than a Desktop PC and Windows 8 is evident of this with its metro home screen. Windows 8 supports arm processors which are quite commonly installed on mobile devices such as a tablet.  A big advantage of installing windows 8 on a tablet with such a processor is the power consumption is much less than a desktop or laptop.

Microsoft Windows 8 comes with its own app store, broadening the choice for end users so they are not limited with Apple or Androids app stores. So you may ask yourself Is Windows 8 right for you? Below is just a few of the improved tweaks over previous Microsoft operating systems.

Windows 8 Touch
 

The first thing you will notice when using Windows 8 is its user interface. Windows 7 supported touch technology, in my opinion, is really not that good. However, in Windows 8 it is vastly improved and the home screen is now composed of tiles instead of the traditional desktop we have all become used to. Windows 8 has ‘built in’ intelligence so it knows what you are trying to do. Some old features carried over from previous OS versions have vastly improved due to the touch screen capability, like the on-screen keyboard or handwriting recognition.

 Windows 8 Cloud Integration

With Windows 8 you now have the potential to sync your data to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage, as well as the ability to save data to and from your own cloud storage. It is not only Windows 8 that is starting to use cloud based technology, Microsoft have included this in their new release of Office 2013.

Account Sync

Windows 8 can sync your user account settings across multiple PCs. This in itself is a fantastic feature, saving you time and effort when you use more than one computer.

Improved Multiple monitor Support

The new improved multiple monitor support now allows you to have a taskbar on each screen as well as different wallpapers for each display.

New file copy features

Windows 7 permitted you to copy more than one file at a time but it appeared in separate dialogue boxes and you only had one option for cancelling the copy. In Windows 8, when you begin to copy more than one file, it shows in the same dialogue box and users now have the option of pausing multiple file copies from one dialogue box.

Storage Space

Storage space allows you to manage all of your internal and external storage as if they were one huge drive, called a storage pool. This feature also duplicates your data across multiple drives in the pool to create redundancy in the event of a drive failure.

These are only a handful of the many improvements brought to you in Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which are set to make it yet another excellent product from Microsoft.