Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery

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Planning for Continuity

Data and communication centers are the heart of most companies today. When either key asset is compromised -- whether by hardware failure, software failure, data corruption, or data loss -- a company faces severe potential losses unless a robust contingency plan is already in place.

An enterprise-wide contingency strategy provides many benefits. Perhaps the most important, direct, and measurable benefit is that such a strategy will minimize financial losses in the face of any type of disaster. Having a solid, well-tested plan in place will help to restore IT and telecommunications infrastructures quickly in order to minimize interruptions for personnel, suppliers, vendors, partners, investors, and customers. Such fast restoration would not only preserve but also strengthen the company's reputation and professional standing in the business community.

Business Continuity Planning

Benefits of Business Continuity Planning
1. Minimizes financial loss in face of any type of disaster
2. Reduces time required to restore operations
3. Increases sense of security and reduces level of fear among personnel, suppliers, investors, and customers

The process of creating, testing, and maintaining an organization-wide plan to recover from any form of disaster is called Business Continuity Planning (BCP). Every BCP strategy includes three fundamental components: risk assessment, contingency planning, and the actual disaster recovery process. BCP should encompass every type of business interruption -- from the slightest two-second power outage or spike up to the worst possible natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Sun & BCP

Hopefully, a disaster will never strike your company -- but in planning for potential disruptions or in the event a disaster does strike -- Sun and its impressive array of products, services, and alliances should be a core component of your Business Continuity Plan.

SunPlex Environment

Sun Cluster software, a key component of SunPlex environment, is designed to deliver high-availability application services to the data center or enterprise. Sun Cluster software extends the Solaris Operating Environment, enabling the use of core Solaris services, such as devices, file systems, and networks, in a virtually seamless manner across a tightly coupled cluster, while maintaining full Solaris Operating Environment compatibility for existing applications. The SunPlex environment -- built around Sun Cluster software as well as the Solaris Operating Environment and Sun server, storage, and network connectivity products and services -- helps increase service levels while decreasing service level cost and risk.

Dynamic System Domains

Dynamic System Domains bring mainframe-style partitioning capabilities to the Unix world. These domains allow a single Sun Enterprise 10000 server to be logically divided into multiple or "stand-alone" servers. Every Dynamic System Domain remains logically isolated from any other domain in the system. Most sites today require separate environments for development, testing, and production. Because domains allow multiple applications to run in isolation on a single server, they play an important role in consolidation and business continuity planning because they reduce the number of systems that must be managed.

Sun Data Center Consolidation Program

Sun Data Center Consolidation Program helps companies reduce information technology complexity and lower total cost of ownership. This program is designed to help customers reduce the complexity and cost of their IT infrastructure by physically consolidating their servers and logically consolidating applications. Sun firsts helps customers evaluate their existing infrastructure and identify areas where major benefits from consolidation could be realized. Then Sun provides the professional installation, system migration, testing, and support services necessary for a smooth, uninterrupted consolidation transition.

Data protection is business protection. See Network Storage Backup & Restore for more information on how Sun can assist you with the first layer of your Business Continuity Plan.