Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Yields ROI
- 17 June, 2010 05:53
- Comments
The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.
Offloading the expense of buying your own hardware, software and networking capabilities for use during a prolonged outage, as well as that of the ongoing maintenance of duplicate infrastructure, can produce measurable savings, says Eric Heidrich, director of IT at Help At Home. He expects to save $150,000 over three years, mainly by cost avoidance.
Infrastructure as a service is the original impetus for cloud computing, says Judith Hurwitz, CEO of the consultancy Hurwitz and Associates, and it can be cost-effective. Other companies also see cloud computing as a means for disaster recovery. TheStreet.com hired Iron Mountain to back up and restore data and applications in the event of a prolonged outage, CIO Daniel Flax explained at the recent CIO Perspectives conference in New York.
Help At Home is a private company that assists the elderly and disabled with household chores-like cleaning, cooking and errands-and routine health care. The company employs 13,000 field workers in nine states.
Since Heidrich arrived at Help At Home in 2008, he has virtualized nearly all of the company's servers on VMware. He had been doing backups with SonicWall's continuous data-protection appliance. The vendor constantly searched files and databases for changes, and Help At Home paid a monthly fee, he says.
But SonicWall's appliance wasn't backing up operating systems or imaging any servers, because that required the added expense of installing SonicWall software on every Help At Home server. Yet restricting SonicWall's use to only data meant that in a disaster-such as a long power outage caused by a storm-no server images or application configurations would be saved. This type of outage hasn't happened yet, but the company must prepare, Heidrich says.
For full disaster recovery, he first considered making one of the company's 85 offices the fail-over site. But duplicating and maintaining that infrastructure would have cost about $190,000 over three years, he says. That price tag includes a four-node storage area network, two switches, three servers and an uninterruptible power supply; a fast Internet connection between the main office and the branch; about 40 hours of set-up time (amounting to $15,000 in labor) and three hours per week of ongoing maintenance, at a cost of $20,000 over three years. Instead, Heidrich found Iland, a cloud infrastructure vendor, through a Google search for VMware-related disaster-recovery ideas.
Using Iland costs Help At Home only $48,000 over three years, Heidrich says. He counts the difference-about $140,000-as money saved. Iland taps into Help At Home via a VPN and uses its replication product to copy any changes in VMware images to Iland servers nightly. Some critical applications, such as client management and billing, are replicated more often. If a disaster occurs, Iland can restore all of Help At Home's virtual machines on its own hardware, and branch offices will be redirected to Iland.
Restoring in the cloud is much quicker than other disaster-recovery scenarios, Heidrich says, "and there's no hardware to buy."
Read more about data management in CIO's Data Management Drilldown.
Recommended
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email CIO
- Follow CIO on twitter
-
Why change management doesn’t work
-
Larry Page wants to see your medical records
-
Dual-Persona Smartphones Not a BYOD Panacea
-
After two-year hiatus, EFF accepts bitcoin donations again
-
CIOs struggle to deliver timely mobile business apps: survey
-
Tips Choosing a Cloud Service Provider
Because cloud is still a new and evolving business model, it can be argued that the decision to select a cloud service provider should be approached with even greater diligence than other IT decisions. Many providers use the same term to define very different services, “hybrid cloud” is one example, making it difficult to compare offers. This whitepaper will help enterprises evaluate their options in two critical areas: the cloud service portfolio and the service provider itself. Read now. -
Endpoint Security and Virtualisation
Besides form factor, virtual systems are not really that different than physical systems. They both use the same operating systems and applications. They both present users with computing resources such as RAM and hard drives. Consequently, the ability to exploit vulnerabilities in a physical environment will present a significant threat to virtualised environments as well. This paper examines the different endpoint security methods for virtualised environments and presents how Endpoint Protection security provides optimal performance, protection and manageability. -
The Foundation for Cloud Management
For businesses looking to provide real-time business solutions to employees and customers alike, you need to have a comprehensive network management strategy. The network is the foundation of all successful cloud services; it must be robust to meet traffic, efficiency, and performance demands. Download today the four steps to get your network operations cloud-ready.
Get exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis. 
