Recovery's Mirror ImageRecovery's Mirror Image

Before Sept. 11, Michelle Ortner, Ford Motor Co.'s disaster backup and recovery planning and security supervisor, could have talked to management about disaster recovery until she was blue in the face without much result. Now she's overseeing the installation of 25 terabytes of storage using EMC Corp.'s Symmetrix technology and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software so that all mainframe-based applications are mirrored. To Ortner, the mirrored data centers being created will be the first step toward continuous availability. Ford has 70 terabytes of Symmetrix in place for mainframe apps. The automaker is adding the industry's state-of-the-art business-continuity platform in two Dearborn, Mich., data centers. The two data centers will run in sync and, Ortner says, "We expect to run at either site and not have any program degradation."

The Sept. 11 attacks have sharpened the focus on disaster recovery for many companies and added an emphasis on business-continuity planning that wasn't there before. As a result, vendors of disaster-recovery and business-continuity technology and services have sharpened their focus on the areas most in demand by customers: backup and recovery, data mirroring, business-continuity planning, and work-area recovery.

The most complete way to guarantee immediate recovery is with remote data mirroring. "There's awareness now that if you want disaster recovery with no data lost, up to the last millisecond, there's no choice but to do remote mirroring," says Jim Rothnie, EMC's chief technology officer. To complement its products, EMC plans this quarter to unveil Symmetrix Automated Replication, a utility to ease the manual process of starting up, configuring, and testing data volumes related to Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software. Currently, customers themselves have to write scripts. "Customers spend days the first time through and later it would take hours," Rothnie says. "With Symmetrix Automated Replication, it'll take minutes."

Still, most companies must face the hard economic facts behind business continuity, Meta Group analyst and service director Carl Greiner says. A mirrored data center with zero downtime can cost three times many companies' entire IT budgets, since it means geographic distance that ensures a protected mirror with no outages, software intelligence, and WAN costs.

Michael Mark, CEO at SoftwarePlus Inc., a Florham Park, N.J., application service provider of financial and human-resources software, was happy that a customer on 14th Street in New York got its people home on Sept. 11; from their homes, they logged on to his servers and got their work done. Mark and his team had investigated the mirrored-data approach and determined it would have cost the company $500,000 for three years; SoftwarePlus just passed twice that in annual revenue, so he needed an alternative.

He turned to database and Web service vendor Progress Software Corp. With Progress' Hybrid Hosting service, customers pay for one of three options: data backup with restoration within a day or two; backup of databases and applications within hours; and hot standby involving a mirrored system geographically dispersed so recovery can happen within minutes.

Companies like SoftwarePlus Inc., without the funds or personnel to handle availability themselves, often outsource these responsibilities to service providers. Service providers let companies have a single data center and outsource backup and recovery for 1.4 times their IT budget, Meta Group's Greiner says. He predicts that by 2006, more than 50% of companies will have one data center and use a third party for disaster protection.

SunGard Data Systems recently acquired Comdisco Inc.'s Business Continuity Services, making it the largest business-continuity service provider. Earlier this month, SunGard launched its $1 billion Availability Services unit, which has about 2,000 employees and more than 60 backup and recovery facilities. The technology for network monitoring and management, information security, data storage, and redundancy is getting more sophisticated every day to shrink recovery-time objectives, says Jim Simmons, CEO at SunGard Availability Services. Companies are demanding more options for recovery, and this is translating into a greater demand for planning, high availability, and backup work-area services.

Since losing its facility at Seven World Trade Center on Sept. 11, American Express Bank, the international banking arm of American Express Co., is working with EDS consultants to enhance a business-recovery plan that takes into account employee availability as well as electronic backup of a wider scope of data. Graham Brown, American Express Bank's VP of technology, says he had been skeptical of service providers' "value-add" resources, which involve paying to reserve consultants and workspace during an emergency. "But having lived and worked [through Sept. 11], I won't be as dismissive in the future when vendors try to sell their services as a value-add. EDS was able to deliver people already familiar with our environment in a reasonable amount of time," he says.

Work-area recovery is a high priority. "We lost 480,000 square feet, which left 1,900 people with no place to go," says David Snow, president and chief operating officer at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which rented office space in One World Trade Center. The health-care provider was able to place only 300 call-center and IT employees at an IBM facility in Melville, N.Y. The rest were sent to four locations in Brooklyn, midtown Manhattan, and Long Island. "At the right price, it would have been helpful to place all 1,900 employees at a single IBM facility," Snow says. "But I don't know how you can lock up 480,000 square feet of space and pay to hold on to it."