Spain’s General Comptroller Office Ensures 24×7 BC

This case study examines the DR and HA challenges surrounding the need to protect and ensure the
continuous availability and performance of critical data center operations at
Spain’s General Comptroller of the State Administration Office. The case study
analyzes the benefits gained by implementing RecoverGuard to
assess HA/DR readiness, avoid system downtime and data loss, and optimize HA/DR
investment.

The
General Comptroller of the State Administration in Spain (Intervención
General de la Administración del Estado, or IGAE) is tasked with providing
transparent, reliable, complete and independent accounting information
concerning the public administration.

In light of the national importance of its services, and with its commitment to transparency to the public through technologies including online access, the General Comptroller Office
has been setting high standards for 24×7 service availability.

The IT Environment:
The General Comptroller has put effort and
skill into the design of IT solutions that provide service availability
and data protection. The results are facilities with a
data center architecture that consists of production and DR sites connected by
fiber optics with continuous data replication.

The production environment is based on a central Hitachi
storage, Unix and Windows servers (with increasing use of
virtualization), and various database tools. Data protection relies on
continuous replication and Point-in-Time storage-based technologies.
Availability is achieved through use of local and geo-clustering
including Veritas Cluster Server, MSCS, and SRM.

Challenges:
Given the criticality of its data center operations, the
General Comptroller Office has defined strict RTOs
and RPOs. RTO refers to the acceptable amount of
time to restore operations, while RPO refers to the amount of data that can be
lost without significantly affecting the organization. These RTO and RPO
therefore define the organization’s backup, replication, and other DR
requirements.

With daily changes to the IT environment (critical patches,
updates, new storage allocation, server refresh, etc.), the readiness of the
recovery environment must be continually re-verified. The General Comptroller’s
IT department has traditionally addressed this need by performing regular DR
tests and frequent audits of the recovery configuration.

Without automation, however, these tasks were
resource-consuming, and could potentially disrupt systems’ availability. With
the industry average frequency for a complete DR test being just once a year,
the people in charge at the General Comptroller Office were determined to find
a way to ensure a higher level of confidence in their 24×7
availability.

To this end, the IGAE decided to look for solutions that
would assure readiness and compatibility between the production and DR sites in
a consistent and automatic manner. From the several solutions that were
evaluated, Continuity Software’s RecoverGuard was chosen as most suitable and
easiest to implement.

The Solution: RecoverGuard
Continuity
Software’s RecoverGuard was selected to provide the General Comptroller
Office with the following capabilities to ensure ongoing data protection,
disaster recoverability, and business continuity:

• IT discovery and scanning. RecoverGuard automatically and
  continually scans the IT environment and unobtrusively collects critical
  configuration data from key IT assets, including storage, servers, virtual
  environments, and databases.
• Risk detection. RecoverGuard identifies and reports on more
  than 4,900 known vulnerabilities that can pose downtime or data-loss risk to
  the IT infrastructure. It then alerts the appropriate IT resources via email or
  directly through the organization’s ticket management system.
• Visualization and reports. When users are alerted to a risk,
  RecoverGuard allows them to drill down and investigate the relevant IT
  infrastructure configuration status, as well as any previously discovered data
  protection and disaster recovery gaps (SLA compliance and exceptions, change
  and audit reports, and configuration changes trend analysis).
  Optimization. Leveraging the data center topology map to
  detect under/over utilized assets, RecoverGuard enables the organization to
  fine-tune resources and maximize the value of its infrastructure investment.

Cross-environment support. RecoverGuard supports all major
platforms, operating and storage systems (e.g. EMC, HDS, IBM, HP, NetApp) and
replication solutions (both storage and database level), and integrates with
the leading Configuration Management Databases (CMDB). It can also identify and
address host configuration gaps and other risks in VMware and other virtualization environments.

In addition to the RecoverGuard software, Continuity Software
provides DR Assurance, a Web-based service that remotely monitors the
customer’s environment for disaster recovery and high availability
vulnerabilities.

Results and Benefits:
"Immediately
following the short deployment, RecoverGuard started to demonstrate a clear
improvement in our processes and readiness," says Manuel Alonso, Head
of IT Systems and Infrastructure of the Sub Directorate of Operations of the
General Comptroller Office. "It also
provided valuable suggestions for improving our HA/DR infrastructure and
maximizing our investment."

The benefits extend beyond the initial scan,
however, as RecoverGuard continuously detects configuration gaps, prioritizes
them and reports in an actionable way. This allows the IT team to
mitigate risks and reduce the time and effort involved in
identifying root-cause and maintaining a high state of readiness.

The results are noticeable:

• Reduction in daily workload for HA/DR validation
• Proactive risk management that leads to improved service
  availability
• Smooth and successful DR testing
• Visibility to RPO and RTO metrics and a single-pane-of
  glass to show IT readiness at any given time

"With
RecoverGuard in place, the uncertainty factor has been eliminated and we now feel
more confident that the IT infrastructure configuration is aligned with our
HA/DR recovery goals," adds Manuel Alonso.

In addition to RecoverGuard, the General Comptroller Office
has been using the DR Assurance service, which provides quarterly reports
summarizing all events, configuration gaps and errors, as well as
recommendations for improving the efficiency of DR and data protection
operations and processes.