DataCore’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) solutions, powered by SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage (SDS), are designed to deliver uninterrupted, 24×7 access to critical data by mitigating the risks of equipment failures, site outages, and other disruptions in SAN and HCI environments. In an era where hardware failures cause 45% of unplanned downtime, small businesses face an average 3-month recovery from disasters, and significant data center outages can cost between $100K and $1M, traditional BC/DR approaches often fall short in heterogeneous IT setups due to incompatibilities between storage systems. DataCore addresses this by implementing three lines of defense—Bypass Failures (HA), Recover Remotely (DR), and Point-in-Time Restore—that leverage data replication, automatic failover, and granular recovery mechanisms. These ensure continuous business operations, fast recovery, and non-disruptive upgrades, effectively eliminating downtime and enabling “24×7 access” through proactive redundancy and automation. Below, we address the key challenges outlined in the content, drawing directly from DataCore’s approach.

How well does your BC/DR plan adapt to changing conditions?

DataCore’s solutions are highly adaptive to evolving IT environments, including growing numbers of diverse storage devices across distributed SAN and HCI setups. SANsymphony provides uniform high-end data protection services that work across heterogeneous storage equipment, allowing seamless integration with existing infrastructure without requiring hardware replacements. It supports non-disruptive technology refreshes and expansions, so as conditions change (e.g., adding new storage or scaling locations), the BC/DR plan automatically incorporates these changes via real-time replication and automated resynchronization. This flexibility ensures the plan remains effective amid hardware aging, site expansions, or shifting workloads, preventing the pitfalls of rigid, device-specific strategies.

How do you protect against failures of diverse storage components?

Protection against diverse storage component failures is achieved through the first line of defense: Bypass Failures (HA). Data is replicated in real-time between physically separate locations (e.g., within a room, campus, or metro cluster) to create active-active copies, known as fault domains. If one component or system fails, automatic failover switches to the redundant copy, ensuring continuous data access without loss. Once repaired, the system resynchronizes the mirrors automatically. This approach is vendor-agnostic, applying uniformly to diverse SAN and HCI storage, circumventing outages from hardware issues like disk failures or controller malfunctions. For example, the City of Carmel reported: “SANsymphony works extremely well from a high availability standpoint and allows for proactive and reactive failures – while still providing high performance. If one site goes down, the city can still function, and end-users don’t even know there is a problem.”

How do you resume business operations in the event of larger outages (e.g., power, fire, floods, etc.)?

For larger regional outages like power failures, fires, or floods, the second line of defense—Recover Remotely (DR)—enables quick resumption by asynchronously replicating data over a WAN to a remote secondary/DR site. This creates redundant copies that can be activated via automated failover when the primary site is impacted, minimizing loss of in-flight data. After the outage is resolved, the system supports automated resynchronization and failback to the original site. While Recovery Time Objective (RTO) may be longer due to restarting applications at the DR site, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) could involve a few minutes of potential data loss, planned scenarios (e.g., scheduled maintenance) can achieve near-zero RPO/RTO by quiescing workloads first. This ensures business operations resume rapidly from the contingency site, maintaining data availability during disasters.

How do you restore to the last healthy/known good data state?

Restoration to the last healthy/known good data state is handled by the third line of defense: Point-in-Time Restore. This uses point-in-time backups, snapshots, or Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to revert data to a trusted state before unwanted changes occurred, such as accidental deletions, software bugs, or ransomware attacks. Unlike replication (which copies errors too), these mechanisms allow rollback to a specific moment—down to the second with CDP—ensuring recovery from a clean, pre-incident copy. RTO depends on the storage media (minutes to hours), while RPO is based on the interval since the last backup or snapshot. For instance, in a ransomware scenario, SANsymphony’s CDP enables rolling back just before the breach for near-zero RPO and fast RTO.

What is your last healthy/known good data state?

The last healthy/known good data state is defined as the most recent verifiable, uncorrupted point-in-time copy of your data, captured via SANsymphony’s snapshots, backups, or CDP before any failure, error, or attack. This could be seconds, minutes, or hours prior, depending on your configuration—e.g., real-time replication for HA ensures the state is always current within the site, while asynchronous DR or periodic snapshots define it for broader recoveries. DataCore emphasizes identifying and maintaining these states through automated tools, ensuring they represent a “trusted copy” free from the effects of the incident, allowing precise restoration without further data compromise.

How do you replace failing or aging storage hardware without impacting business operations?

Replacing failing or aging hardware is seamless and non-disruptive thanks to SANsymphony’s active-active replication and automated failover features. Data remains accessible from redundant copies during the replacement process, with no interruption to applications or users. The system supports proactive hardware decommissioning by mirroring data to new devices in real-time, followed by automatic resynchronization once the new hardware is online. This applies across diverse storage, enabling technology refreshes (e.g., upgrading controllers or disks) without downtime, as highlighted in the key benefits: “Non-disruptive technology refresh and expansion.”
In summary, DataCore’s BC/DR framework transforms vulnerability into resilience, saying goodbye to downtime by combining these defenses into a comprehensive plan. Partners assist in tailoring it to your setup, focusing on strategies for minimal RTO/RPO and secure, continuous data access. For volatile times, resources like the “Business Continuity Practices for Volatile Times” webinar provide further guidance on implementation.