Cisco Systems MDS 9000 Manuel D’Utilisation

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Backup and Recovery Solutions with the

 Family

The purpose of this whitepaper is to discuss backup and recovery architectures and solutions

and outline the applicable features of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors

and Fabric Switches.

Global enterprises with mission critical data residing on their servers demand continuous

availability for their applications.   Applications such as supply chain management (SCM),

enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) are

creating voluminous amounts of data that must be protected at all costs. At a minimum, this

data must be backed up to tape regularly as an insurance policy against a potential loss of

data. However, growing data volumes requiring larger storage capacity, faster servers, and

also require longer time windows for backup. One must also consider that data that takes

several hours to backup will also take the same length of time for a full restore should the

need arise. This restore time is often unacceptable as it translates into lost revenue due to

extended downtime. Therefore, in many cases, tape backup is considered a minimum level

of disaster recovery (DR) planning.

In order to ensure 99.999% uptime required by these enterprise applications, a storage

design must incorporate additional high availability considerations at every level. A disaster

recovery plan, imperative for all enterprises, must address this concern of potential extended

outages and provide seamless failover to a secondary site during major outages.

Corporations often utilize replication technology to remotely replicate a whole data center,

in addition to tape backup, in their DR plan. Therefore, a recovery now can include a data

center fail over to a live remote location in addition to a data restore from tapes. Disasters

can be caused by a myriad of factors and are difficult to predict. Some key scenarios are listed

below:

• Equipment failure

• Application failure

• Human error

• Natural and unnatural disasters

Each enterprise must prepare to recover from disasters and identify all critical data that must

be preserved for continuous access. Business impact and risk analysis must be performed to

identify locations, functions, or applications most critical to the enterprise. A remote data

center, a mirrored image of the primary one, is used to provide full access after a major

disaster. Many DR solutions involve keeping real-time replicated images of data in