HPE Shadowbase Business Continuity Solutions

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity (or business reliance or business continuance) encompasses the activities that an enterprise performs to maintain consistency and recoverability of its data, operations, and services.

Real-world Shadowbase Business Continuity Use Cases

iStock

Key Terms

  • Application availability depends upon the ability of IT services to survive any fault, whether it is a server failure, a network fault, or a datacenter disaster.
  • Data availability depends on the existence of up-to-date backup data copies.
  • Data replication is an enabling technology for achieving high or continuous availability for application services and the timely backup of important data.
Read the Solution Brief
Related Content
Publications: HPE Shadowbase Business Continuity Solutions
White Papers: Choosing a Business Continuity Solution to Match Your Business Availability Requirements
Featured: May 2, 2023 — Gravic Publishes New White Paper: The Advantages of Transaction Protection

"Zero tolerance of failure by information security professionals is unrealistic, and makes it harder for cyber security folk to do the essential part of their job: recovering fast from inevitable attacks."

-Gartner

"When it comes to disaster recovery, preparation is everything. Without a solid plan in place, people will be forced to make it up as they go along."

-CloudTweaks

"...while 95 percent of organizations have a disaster recovery plan in place, 23 percent never test their plan. The findings indicate a lack of testing and coverage gaps within disaster recovery plans may be leading to service outages in many organizations."

-Spiceworks

Average Cost of Downtime per Hour by Industry (in USD)

Figure 1 — Average Cost of Downtime per Hour by Industry (in $US)

Figure 1 states the numerous costs per hour of downtime by industry: healthcare loses $636K, retail $1.1M, financial $1.5M, manufacturing $1.6M, and Communications/Media/Entertainment $2M, with the average at $1.4M. (Source: Network Computing, the Meta Group, Contingency Planning Research.)

International Data Corporation (IDC) Availability Levels

The IDC defines four Availability Levels (ALs), AL1 – AL4, for classifying downtime. Each level corresponds to the number of 9s in the average availability after the decimal point. It also calculates the average cost of downtime for each level from the “Average Cost of Downtime per Hour” in Figure 1 (note: $1.4M USD per hour equals $388.88 USD per second, on average). Note that Shadowbase business continuity architecture satisfies the most demanding ALs (AL2 – AL4).

Table 1 — IDC Availability Levels
Availability Level (AL)1 Shadowbase Architecture User Notice Ability Yearly Downtime2 Yearly Cost (USD)
AL1: 99.9% N/A All work stoppage, uncontrolled shutdown 08:45:56 $1,227,149.73 (USD)
AL2: 99.99%

Active/Passive

 User interruption, performance degradation, in-flight transaction interruptions 00:52:35 $122,714.97 (USD)
AL3: 99.999%

Sizzling-Hot-Takeover

 Performance degradation, automatic failover transfers 00:05:15 $12,271.50 (USD)
AL4: 99.9999%

Active/Active

 None 00:00:31 $1,227.15 (USD)
1Source: IDC Publishes High Availability Survey
2Note: “Yearly Downtime” is expressed in hours (HH), minutes (MM), and seconds (SS) timestamp format: HH:MM:SS.

HPE Shadowbase Solutions Support a Range of Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

Businesses with access to real-time online transactional data have a competitive advantage

RTOs of minutes to seconds is considered high availability, while RTOs of seconds to sub-seconds is considered continuous availability.

To gain the most potential from this data it must be current and available at any given time

The inability to access or update current data carries a significant business cost, possibly measured in many thousands of dollars per second.

 

 

Note, companies already know that they need to specify their datacenters’ availability in terms of their RPO and RTO. We argue that companies also need to know their:

  • Integrity Point Objective (IPO) – the amount of corrupted data that the application, company, and users can tolerate,
  • Integrity Time Objective (ITO) – the amount of time that the application, company, and users can tolerate corrupted data before the problem is resolved.

Figure 2 — The HPE Shadowbase Business Continuity Continuum (BCC)

*Note: Shadowbase ZDL architectures are future synchronous technologies; specifications are subject to change without notice, and delivery dates are not guaranteed.

In Figure 2, AL and the amount of data loss in each architecture improves as you move from the lower left to the upper right: horizontally from an active/passive through sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) to an active/active architecture, and vertically from asynchronous to synchronous data replication technology.

The Solution: HPE Shadowbase

HPE Shadowbase solutions offer a range of data replication capabilities to meet every application availability and data recoverability need

The overall return on investment in deploying a Shadowbase business continuity solution is positive, by preventing prolonged periods of downtime or data loss which can cost a business thousands or even millions of dollars.

HPE Shadowbase data replication solutions support low-latency, uni-directional, and bi-directional data replication between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems and databases with scalability, selectivity, and sophisticated data transformation and mapping facilities, therefore providing a business continuity solution to meet any business requirement.

Shutterstock

Business Continuity FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions Regarding System Recovery

  1. Has Gravic ever been involved with helping a customer recover its system after a significant disaster? If so, what was the worst part of the recovery?
  2. Are there any differences in the effort to recover an environment using ENSCRIBE, SQL/MP or SQL/MX? If so, what are they
  3. What is the biggest advantage of using a data replication product like Shadowbase software to recover data vs. virtual tape?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Thinkstock/iStock

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Active/Passive Replication Systems

Uni-directional active/passive disaster recovery for high availability.

  • Classic disaster recovery configurations
  • Applications must be started following a failure of the active node
  • The passive system is typically used for read-only query and reporting purposes
Discover Shadowbase DR
Getty Images

Sizzling-Hot-Takeover (SZT)

Active/Almost-Active Replication Systems

  • Bi-directional active/almost-active for higher availability
  • Hot standby — application is up and running
  • Failover fault avoidance
  • Recover to known-working system
  • Standby availability testing while production system is active
  • Shadowbase automatic failover and recovery
Discover Shadowbase SZT
Shutterstock

Continuous Availability (CA)

Active/Active Replication Systems

  • Bi-directional active/active (hot-hot) disaster tolerant architecture
  • Shadowbase automatic failover and recovery
Discover Shadowbase Continuous Availability
Shutterstock

Shadowbase Zero Data Loss (ZDL)

Synchronous Replication Technology

  • Elimination of data loss in the event of an outage
  • Elimination of data collisions in active/active architectures
Discover Shadowbase Zero Data Loss
Shutterstock

HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM)

Eliminate Planned Application Downtime

  • Migrate to new hardware (homogeneous or heterogeneous)
  • Avoid the risk of classic big-bang conversions and outage windows
  • Capacity expansion — expand with symmetric or asymmetric nodes
  • Load balancing — redistribute users and partitions across the network
  • Disaster tolerance and data locality — disperse nodes geographically
  • Migrations — in increments, or initially to an active/active environment
  • Operations — risk-free failover/recovery testing, or run and maintain unattended sites
Discover Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration
Shutterstock

HPE Shadowbase DDL Command Replication (DCR)

Automatically Replicate and Apply DDL Commands

Shadowbase DCR automatically replicates and applies SQL/MP SQLCI (DDL) source commands to the target database. It automatically adjusts the source command to match the target environment’s details (e.g., file / table name mapping).

SQLCI DDL commands integrate with HPE Shadowbase (DML) real-time replication. It is particularly helpful to customers migrating from RDF / SDR to HPE Shadowbase.

Discover HPE Shadowbase DDL Command Replication (DCR)
Shutterstock

HPE Shadowbase Solutions and HPE Pathway Domains

HPE NonStop Pathway is an application framework that is a mainstay of mission-critical online transactional processing (OLTP) systems.

  • The Pathway Model
  • HPE Shadowbase and Pathway Domains
Discover Shadowbase Solutions & Pathway Domains