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In many companies, even the briefest service interruptions can have long-lasting financial impacts. For those businesses, disaster recovery planning has become a vital IT initiative. The HP Enterprise Virtual Array File Services (EVA File Services) NAS storage platform offers IT organisations a flexible, reliable foundation for recovery plans, ensuring access to critical data and applications in the event of a disaster.

The first step in recovery planning is to assess the following: tolerance level for data loss, customer impact, revenue impact and cost to the business. This establishes a risk-cost profile for each IT service. Using this data, you can architect an appropriate disaster recovery solution, as approaches can vary significantly in cost and complexity based on objectives for data loss and recovery time.

Disaster recovery solutions should also account for distances between your company’s data centre locations, performance levels required by customers and clients and the IT staff’s knowledge base. For mission-critical data and applications, the ideal plan must provide zero data loss and very low recovery time, with customers and clients seeing insignificant loss of service.

With the HP EVA File Services, IT organisations can develop a disaster recovery plan that offers zero or near-zero recovery time. HP EVA File Services is built on a cluster file system that pools data. The pooled storage is fully fault tolerant and highly available, with no single points of failure in the system. For mission-critical data and applications, where service disruptions and data loss must be kept to absolute minimums, HP StorageWorks disaster recovery solutions and EVA File Services offer organisations a unique toolset for creating and fulfilling aggressive recovery plans.

Key features of the cluster file system architecture specifically address the following aspects of a comprehensive recovery plan:

Fault Tolerant Systems – High-availability solutions should deploy robust, fault tolerant primary systems. The HP EVA File Services is able to ride through most component failures without disrupting service.

Replication – Replicating data to a second EVA File Services system at a geographically separated site helps ensure that data will be available even if there is a complete loss of one site.

Synchronisation – HP data protection products, such as Continuous Access, can be used in conjunction with Scalable NAS to provide robust and flexible synchronisation solutions.

Stretch Cluster – Stretch clustering is unique to the EVA File Services and builds on mirroring capabilities for an automatic, geographically distributed disaster recovery model.

A disaster recovery plan prepares your company to deal with threats that could arise anywhere, at any time.