The Importance of BCP (Backup and Continuity Plan)

(To the tune of "American Pie")

"A few short hours ago
I can still remember how my heart sank when I clicked that file
But I knew that this was the chance
To show we'd planned this in advance
And we'd be up and running in a while"

 

"Though monitoring made me shiver
With every alert it delivered
Bad news on the wire
Some rumours of a fire"

 

"I can't remember if we tried
To contact kit that was inside
But BCP got justified
The day the DC died"

 

"So fail back to the secondary site
All the data replicated through the hours of night
Mirrored storage holds it all secure and tight
Proving planning for disaster was right
Planning for disaster was right"

 

My deepest apologies to the good Mr D. McLean, but the topic of Business Continuity Planning is not usually one that makes people's hearts leap with joy. In fact it quite often fills them with dread. But, like an insurance policy, you only realise how important a proper BCP is when you actually need it. By then, it is usually too late.

 

So, what is a Business Continuity Plan?

 

Quite simply, it is a plan to show, and detail, how you plan to continue running your business in the event of a disaster. It covers everything from where staff would work if they were unable to access their normal offices, how they would communicate (telephones, fixed or mobile), what aspect of the business needed to be working first and, of course, access to, or recovery of, computer-held data and systems vital to the business function. The data aspect is what I intend to concentrate on here.

 

What constitutes a disaster?

 

This varies, depending on your business, but could be anything from a burst water pipe flooding your offices, to a fire in your data centre or even terrorist activity (on July 7, 2005 a number of businesses in The City invoked their BCP plans in response to the sad events of that day elsewhere in London).

 

What can you do to ensure your business can survive a disaster?

 

That depends on how long your business can function without access to its most valuable resource; Data. If you can keep going with manual systems whilst your IT team source, build and recover replacement servers and storage then that is great, but you will be in the minority.   Most organisations would be hard-pressed to run for a day without their IT systems and many would be in trouble after a few hours.

 

The first step in protecting your data is to ensure regular backups are taken. These backups could be to physical tape, or to a virtual tape library. If data is backed up to tape then you will need to ensure that the tapes are stored somewhere safe and secure. It is no good just putting them on a shelf next to the system they are intended to restore one day. Tapes should be stored off-site, either with a specialist third party, of which there are many, or at your disaster recovery site, where they will be readily available in the event of DR.

 

If you back up to VTL or use some other disk-based backup process then consider mirroring or replicating this to your DR site. Tivoli Storage Manager V6.3 offers node replication to a secondary server, thus ensuring backup data is available from more than one source in the event of a disaster. IBM's ProtecTIER can be clustered, with nodes at multiple sites replicating their data within the cluster.

 

So, you have all that in place, all your data gets backed up to multiple, seperate locations overnight, critical data is replicated real-time over redundant fibre links, you have got all the bases covered. Congratulations! Now, have you tried restoring some of that data? Do you know for certain that your finance database can be recovered? Have you tried pulling the connection on your fibre switch to make sure it fails over to the secondary link?

 

It is all very well investing the time and effort to build resilience, but you need to know it works, and that means testing it.

 

Schedule a specific date (or dates) to fail over specific, critical systems to the DR site and make sure you can recover them. Make sure all the people involved know what is expected of them. Make sure everything is documented!  I can not stress the importance of documentation too heavily. If your one and only SAP guru is in hospital after a skiing accident when your disaster strikes, you are going to be hard pushed to get your CRM system up and running without detailed documentation.

 

Testing lets you find the bugs, omissions and plain, simple mistakes in your processes, without the pressure of a CEO breathing down your neck. It gives you time to perfect the procedures and build confidence in both your staff and your systems.

 

If you do not test, then you might be lucky and get away with it, but chances are you will be digging a hole for yourself and your business. If you do not even have a plan then that hole will be about 6 feet deep, with a headstone at one end!

 

So set up that plan, make sure everyone understands their role, and most importantly, test it regularly. That way you will not end up like Mr McLean's "good old boys"; drinking whisky and lamenting the death of the "music".

 

Should you require more information on backup and continuity plans, please do not hesitate to contact Celerity.

 

Tony Lloyd - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

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Once Again Celerity Supports 'Movember' 2013 Campaign

Once again this year Chris Roche, MD of Celerity Limited, together with three members of the Celerity Team, Darren Sanders, Phil Reeves and Scott Deuchar are taking part in this year’s Movember Fundraising Campaign, and are to be known as ‘Mo Bros’.

 

 

 

 

Movember challenges men to grow a moustache for the 30-days of November, thereby changing their appearance and the face of men’s health.

 

For the entire month of November each ‘Mo Bro’ must grow and groom a moustache. Strict rules apply and must be adhered to throughout the month – for example there is to be no joining of the mo to the sideburns - as that is considered a beard, and there is certainly no joining of the handlebars to the chin - as that is considered a goatee.

 

‘Mo Bros’ effectively become walking, talking billboards for the 30 days of November and through their actions and words raise awareness of prompting private and public conversation around the often ignored issue of men’s health.

 

The funds raised in the UK are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and their men’s health partners, Prostate Cancer UK and the Institute of Cancer Research. Movember work with these partners to ensure that funds collected are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with their strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

 

In 2012, over 1.1 million Movember members raised £92 million globally.

 

If you would like to donate please click here and either sponsor Chris, Darren, Phil or Scott individually or make a team donation following the on-line instructions.

 

We will be updating this page regularly with photographs of how Celerity's MoBros' efforts are progressing as the weeks go by.  So ...

 

Please support our Celerity Team and help us make a difference by clicking the Donate Now! button below

 

  Click to Donate Now

Many thanks!

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AIX and PowerVM - The Best Fit For Your Business

 

                OK, so why is AIX so popular? .........

No, I am not referring to the French city-commune, located about 30 km north of Marseille, of the same name – but IBM’s Unix Operating System (OS) offering. 

 

As a Unix professional, I sometimes get asked: “…how do I select the right platform…”

 

While there is no fixed answer, usually, when you dig deeper, the picture becomes clearer. More often than not, the answer is AIX.

 

A major factor of its success, is in no small part down to how extremely well AIX is intertwined with IBM's virtualisation technology; PowerVM.

 

Companies nowadays make it a priority to ensure they are able to maximise their return on investment in IT – and rightly so. The association between AIX and PowerVM allows businesses to do just that by reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

 

Lower TCO is achieved by the consolidation of many workloads onto a lesser number of physical systems, slashing overall maintenance costs of hardware, data centre footprint, power and cooling costs, database license fees (through reduced amount of CPU cores), physical cabling and human capital outlays. Overall performance is increased and at the same time, it can facilitate standardisation.

 

Whilst we have seen a big growth spurt in Linux – which is fine by IBM as it is supported on POWER systems – AIX is still the more mature OS. It has better vendor support and a tightly integrated hardware set. The thing that sets AIX apart is that it is the only Unix OS that has fully harnessed decades of IBM technology innovation designed to provide the highest level of performance and reliability. The hardware is optimised and heavily integrated with the OS. It also helps that IBM Power Systems are easily the most powerful of midrange Unix servers ... AIX has grown up side by side with PowerVM and POWER hardware.

 

A Quick Look at AIX 7

 

AIX’s latest guise boasts many great features:-

• It can run applications that operated on AIX 5L and earlier. In other words, it is binary compatible to many previous versions.

• It has built upon its previous scalability to partitions with 256 processor cores and 1024, handling the largest of workloads.

• Along with new security features and manageability improvements, Terabyte Segment Support is automatically enabled, meaning enhanced memory management.

• Virtualisation enhancements in the OS allow for a more simplified consolidation of older AIX environments by allowing the backup of an existing LPAR running AIX 5.3, and restoring it into an a AIX 7 Workload Partition. 

• A really interesting feature is the ‘Cluster Aware AIX’ aspect, bringing elements of clustering technology into base OS. Vendors have long acknowledged the importance of clustering and this move underlines it. Cluster Aware AIX simplifies the configuration and management of high availability clusters, which is great news for us Systems Administrators.

Conclusion

For the enterprise company running mission-critical applications, nothing is more important than having an OS that is robust and reliable, along with a top, vendor supported virtualisation platform. Evolving business requirements dictate that infrastructures need to be flexible and are capable of adjusting accordingly.

It is for these reasons that more and more organisations are choosing AIX.

Furthermore, unlike other Unix hardware vendors, IBM provides a clear road map for AIX.

AIX continues to grow market share…. The future of AIX is strong!

If you require any further information regarding IBM Unix Operating System offering please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity Representative or email info@celerity-uk.com

 

Chris Lang - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

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IBM Announces Ultra-Dense NetXtScale Server Systems

On 10th September 2013 IBM made a number of big announcements related to System x. These offerings include a brand new dense computing platform named IBM NeXtScale System that aims at scale-out datacentres and targets cloud, technical computing, analytics and social media computing.

NeXtScale has been developed from IBM technologies including iDataPlex and BladeCenter and provides an ultra-dense platform which can squeeze up to 84 dual processor servers into a single 42U rack. Effectively, this equates to up to 2016 processing cores per rack. Unlike iDataPlex, NeXtScale infrastructure uses industry standard 19 inch racks. With a building block approach to scalability, it allows organisations of all sizes and budgets to start small but scale rapidly and easily if required.

The idea behind modern applications is that they scale across multiple nodes and have their RAS features inherent in the software layer. Thus there is no technical reason to have so many management controllers, power supplies, fans, and other components in the box. The machine is stripped down to the bare essentials to be a node in a cluster with nothing unnecessary that adds cost. The kinds of parallel applications run by HPC datacentres, public cloud operators, and enterprises setting up private clouds do not always need all of the reliability and management features of full-on, enterprise-class servers. IBM were quoted as saying "We tried to stay away from building a luxury car. This is a high performance race car."

The new servers have been built around Intel’s new Xeon E5-2600 v2 processor family, support ultra-fast 1866 MHz RAM and feature industry-standard components such as I/O cards and top-of-rack networking switches, fitting neatly into existing infrastructure. NeXtScale can operate in temperatures of up to 40C, reducing cooling requirements and further lowering energy expenditure.

A nice feature of IBM NeXtScale is that it is pre-built by IBM and arrives at the client location racked, cabled, and labelled, ready to power on. It is suggested that this can reduce time from arrival to production readiness by up to 75 percent.

If you require any further information regarding the new IBM NeXtScale System please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity Representative or email info@celerity-uk.com

Malcolm Smith - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

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VMware vSphere 5.5 - What's New?

At VMWorld in August VMware released vSphere 5.5. The following is a quick rundown of the main features and enhancements VMware have announced.

 

Single Sign-On (SSO)

 

One of the biggest issues with 5.1 was SSO; It has been well documented online and even VMware have admitted it was not great. With this in mind they have listened to the feedback from customers and re-written the code from the ground up to hopefully resolve the issues. Those with access to the beta have been reporting a huge improvement in ease of installation/upgrade using 5.5.

 

• Removed requirement for a database
• Built-in replication
• Support for one and two-way trusts

 

vSphere Web Client

 

We have a small number of additions to the web client this time around but on the whole the functionality has remained the same. We have noticed an improvement in responsiveness and this can only be a good thing if the Web Client is to eventually become the primary way to manage the vSphere infrastructure.

 

• Full client support for Mac OS X
• Drag and drop
• Recent items
• Improved UI responsiveness

 

Storage

 

One of the big changes to storage is support for 62TB VMDKs up from the previous 2TB. These are now supported with NFS of VMFS-5 datastores and hosts running ESXi 5.5. Other features such as vmotion and snapshots are supported but will take longer to complete for obvious reasons.

 

• Support for 62TB VMDK
• Microsoft Cluster Service – Support for Server 2012 and the FCoE and iSCSI protocols
• 16Gb end-to-end FC support
• VMFS heap improvements
• vSphere flash read cache

 

Networking

 

There are a lot of new network features included with 5.5 as well as LACP enhancements with over 20 different choices for load balancing, 40GB NIC support and QoS tagging. These new features will require the use of a distributed switch.

 

• LACP enhancements
• 40GB NIC support

 

Other changes

 

We have had a nice bump in functionality for the vCenter Appliance bringing it more in line with its Windows counterpart and this will certainly be of interest to those looking to save money on Microsoft licences. We also see expanded vGPU support to now include Intel and AMD GPUs.

 

• vCenter Server Appliance supports 100 hosts and 3000 VMs
• Improved power management by leveraging CPU C-States
• Expanded vGPU support

 

If you would like to know more about the changes in the VMware vSphere 5.5 platform please contact Celerity or download the VMwarePDF  here.

Barry Knox - Celerity Limited - Technical Support

 

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How to Implement A Service Catalogue

IT departments have never before had so many competitors for their role e.g. outsourced services, who expect more for less and (believes) it is more educated than ever before on what IT can do for them. As business change continues to accelerate, and the reliance on IT services becomes more and more a prerequisite for any organisation to stay in business, the challenges on the IT department keep growing.

 

For IT to counter against this, there are two goals that need to be satisfied:

 

• IT needs to provide business value to the organisation for outcomes it wants to achieve
• IT must demonstrate its value to the business, in order to be seen by the business as an enabler of desired outcomes
Delivering a Service Catalogue for an IT organisation will help to:
• Build a clearer picture of the business services required
• Report and manage performance, quality and efficiency of the services delivered
• Apply an appropriate commercial model for the management of the services
• Focus and motivate IT staff to achieve real business success for customers
• Improve the relationship between the business and IT by being service focused

 

The definition of a service catalogue, as defined by ITIL, is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organisation provides or offers to its employees or customers. Although it is quite acceptable to create an environment that is asset orientated rather than service orientated, from a business perspective it is more logical to support the community from a services point of view.

 

There are basically three views of a service catalogue:

 

• User – generally the most common type of service, i.e. request for folder access.
• Business – available for a more senior user i.e. email service.
• Technical – the service that unpins the above two points which contains technical details that’s relevant to the service required.

 

 

The catalogue is the only part of the Service Portfolio that would be published to customers and is used to support the sale and/or delivery of IT services. Service Portfolio Management defines and describes all of the services provided by IT. A service portfolio is the complete set of services that is managed by a service provider and is used to manage the entire lifecycle of all services, which includes three categories:

 

1. Service Pipeline (proposed or in development)

2. Service Catalogue (live or available for deployment)

3. Retired Services

 

Each service within the catalogue would typically include:

 

• A description of the service
• A categorisation or service type
• Any supporting or underpinning services
• Timeframes or service level agreement (SLA) for fulfilling the service
• Costs (if any)
• How to request the service and how its delivery is fulfilled
• Escalation points and key contacts
• Hours of service availability

 

The following 5 basic steps are proposed to develop an initial service catalogue:

 

1. Obtain Management Support This is not only an authorisation from IT: it is imperative to involve the business in the process as well. Working with management, choose a person(s) to build the initial catalogue and identify the Customer(s) or Business Unit(s) you wish to involve in the process. Make a formal presentation about the benefits of the Service Catalogue, how you plan to use it and why you need business participation.

 

2. Establish A Service Catalogue Team The initial service catalogue team should represent various viewpoints from within IT and from the business. Choose members from IT at all levels and functions; invite members from the business unit as well. Often, the business perceives things very differently from IT.

 

3. Define IT Services The team should examine IT and Business activities in an effort to document the major IT services in production. For example, “email”, “SAP”, “Internet”, etc. Be aware that business and IT could have different names for the same service. Using the inventory of services, the team must work to achieve consensus on the services and their names. Once the names are clear, document what the users of the service perceive as their needs.

 

4. The Dry Run After the completion of an initial catalogue, review it to ensure that it is clear and easy to understand. The catalogue may cause a change for some – old service names, for example “email” that IT uses may be different than the new name, for example “Exchange”. It is important to handle these changes through engagement and not through edict.

 

5. Implement Ensure all access points to IT e.g. the Service Desk understands and has implemented the new service names and associated processes.

 

6. Publish the Service Catalogue to the business by posting it to the company intranet, if available, and solicit the business input about its contents.

 

One of the most important threads through the above steps is to ensure appropriate change controls are in place as the service catalogue is a moving target. Depending on the size of the business it may be worth phasing in the changes across the business units to reduce the risk and introducing a pilot scenario.

 

Should you require any further information on Implementing a Service Catalogue please contact Celerity Limited.

 

Kevan Dix - Project Manager - Celerity Limited

 

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