Business Continuity Solutions - DataServerDR

High Availability/ Fault Tolerant Server Cluster Systems

The best practices scenario for production printing environment is one that both makes sense from a functional and strategic perspective and to have a recovery plan in place with the goal to return to normal after the disaster has occurred.

Fault Tolerant Systems

• OVERVIEW

  To the production printing enterprise, a disaster means abrupt disruption of all or part of its printing operations, which may directly result in missed SLA’s and the inability to meet strict deadlines for printing and mailing time sensitive material.

  The NearStar DataServer DR model is a geographically isolated "job-replication" environment and is not the same as a High Availability/ Fault Tolerant cluster system, which consists of two or more DataServer instances operating in a cluster environment at the same location.

  Though both concepts are related to business continuity, high availability is about providing undisrupted continuity of operations whereas disaster recovery involves some amount of downtime, typically measured in days.  This document will discuss both topics.

  While it is the responsibility of the internal business organization to plan appropriately for disasters and business interruptions, the process to prepare for a disaster recovery plan begins by identifying possible causes and effects, analyzing their likelihood and severity, and ranking them in terms of their business priority.

  NearStar enables the enterprise to plug-in a solution that is cost-effective, timely and meets the functional needs of the enterprise not only for Disaster Recovery Job Replication and High Availability, but also leveraging systems to increase operational efficiency and increase capacity when required.

  It is NearStar’s goal to work with our customers as a partner and offer a scalable and flexible end-to-end solution for production print and mail. Drawing on a wide experience with many customers, NearStar offers industry best practices to ensure that DataServer (DR) and Cluster systems are designed to meet the critical business needs of the enterprise. 

• DataServer (DR) Dual Location System Configuration

  Under most scenarios, it takes the enterprise some time to assess the exact effects of the disaster. Only when these are assessed and the affected systems are identified can a recovery process begin. However, with DataServer (DR) in place, the recovery procedure can begin seamlessly as the DataServer internal job replication process will retain your production runs prior to the disaster.

  When configured as a Dual DR location, the system can run in parallel with its sibling location and be utilized for overflow and can operate as a second location with each working system being the DR location for the other.

  The disaster recovery plan should account for the operation of Location A being the (DR) instance for Location B and vice versa. Operationally, each location serves as the DR site for the other and if desired, can serve as secondary overflow facilities for each other.

  When a down-time event occurs at a primary location, traffic is simply re-routed to DR location. Any affected jobs that did not complete are simply re-sent to the new location, however, the replication process will have made it possible to decrease the exposure for lost print jobs.

• High Level: DataServer Disaster Recovery

  • Implementation requires a Primary DataServer in production site and a Secondary DataServer in the chosen Disaster Recovery site
  • Unique implementation; performs job-replication to remote site running DataServer automatically
  • Every job received in Production can be replicated to the Disaster Recovery site without operator intervention
  • When a disaster is declared, the remote site will have all jobs submitted up to the point of declaration
  • All configurations in Production are mirrored in the Remote site, so all is needed is the Systems side will re-point their queues to the remote site to pickup new work
  • Unattended stand-by instance of production system
  • Perfect for a remote disaster recovery facility
  • Automatically route jobs directly to the DataServer DR system
  • Jobs queued and ready for printing at the DR location for immediate processing

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance

  High availability (HA) is critical to building a strong Business Continuity strategy for your print operations environment. With this in mind, enabling DataServer clustering is a critical element for your overall solution.

  A fault tolerant cluster provides high availability in the event of hardware failure by restarting VMs from the failed server on a new host. VMware HA provides HA to all applications running in a VMware vSphere cluster. VMware FT extends this by providing five 9’s availability protecting against disruption and data loss. This extends the high availability to more applications resulting in a higher level of protection at a lower cost compared to non-virtualized environments.

  VMware Fault Tolerance also provides continuous monitoring of events related to the server, by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is in virtual lockstep with the primary instance using VMware's vLockstep technology. By allowing instantaneous fail-over between the two instances in the event of hardware failure, VMware Fault Tolerance can maximize server uptime and minimize or eliminate data loss or disruption.

  VMware Fault Tolerance monitors the applications running in virtual machines, VMware HA provides the fail-over protection against hardware and operating system failures.

  The combination of VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware HA delivers the availability functions for applications in virtual machines, independent of the operating system and application running in it by establishing resource pools of server, storage and network.

• NearStar DataServer High Availability/Fault Tolerant Cluster

  Maximize uptime and reliability over standalone server configurations most commonly implemented.

  Provides a high degree of availability in a single location and a cost-effective implementation when compared to installing dedicated solutions multiple locations