This document summarizes a webinar on building better disaster recovery plans. It discusses how mapping business services to underlying IT infrastructure is important for recovery planning but challenging given constantly changing IT environments. It also outlines different types of protection solutions and strategies for applying the right balance based on business needs and budgets. The webinar promotes a product called Neverfail IT Continuity Architect that aims to help organizations discover, map, and assess their infrastructure dependencies to support business services and improve disaster recovery.

1. Disaster Recovery Shouldn’t Run on
Late Nights and Coffee Alone
A discussion on how to build better disaster recovery plans

2. Introductions
 Neverfail is an IT Business Continuity software company
• 20 years experience in the BCDR field
• Protecting business from downtime
 Strategic industry relationships
• VMware vCenter Heartbeat
• SolarWinds Orion Failover Engine
• Cisco, Honeywell, others…
 Neverfail’s Chief Storyteller
• 18+ years in the tech industry
• 8 years in disaster recovery
• Real-world IT experience
 Online in many places
• Twitter, LinkedIn, Spiceworks…
Josh Mazgelis - @JoshMaz
Chief Storyteller & PMM

3. A New Mug for Your Coffee
 Live participants will receive a free Neverfail coffee mug
• Chalkboard paint exterior for
endless caffeinated doodling
• We’ll even pitch in with some
chalk to get you started

4. Today’s Agenda
 Why infrastructure dependency mapping is important
 Understanding the challenges in DR planning
 Different flavors of protection
 A new way of thinking
 Questions and answers

5. Mapping is Important
Why you need to understand how
infrastructure supports business services

6. How Business sees IT Infrastructure
 Business managers see business services
• Business services are supported by “stuff” in IT
 No correlation between the service
and the infrastructure that supports it
 Keep being asked to spend money
even if returns are invisible
 Only cares about DR when
something is down
Computer Stuff
Happens Here

7. How IT sees Business Services
 IT admins see an inventory of servers, hypervisors, and VM’s
 There is little correlation to complete business services
 Everything there may or may not be important
 Difficult to know if existing
BCDR plans are sufficient
 Difficult to justify the money
for better BCDR projects
Business Stuff
Lives in Here

8. The Results:
 IT ends up spending late nights
figuring out how things work
 IT ends up spending even later nights
when things stop working
 Business owners want to know
why you couldn’t recover faster
 Coffee company profits continue
to rise as consumption increases

9. Dependency Mapping Helps DR Planning
 Planning originates from the business needs
• Business owners identify key services
• Business owners define target service level agreements
 Start with the services that are important to business
• Identify all the components that keep that services running
• Identify the dependencies that support those components
 Build DR plans to support business services
• Justify spending for application dependencies
• Reduce spending for extraneous infrastructure

10. Understanding Challenges
The evolving state of IT infrastructure

11. Off-target Recovery Plans
 Easy to spread basic protection across virtual infrastructure
• May not be good enough to meet RPO/RTO goals
• May be more than necessary for bottom-tier machines
• Hard to hit the target on protection and budget
 Spot solutions don’t provide complete protection
• Database availability means
nothing if the application
is not available

12. Keeping up with Changes
 Virtualization has accelerated the pace of change
• New servers come online; old servers become abandoned
• VM’s easily move between hosts and protection schemes
 Rogue IT ushers in undocumented change
• Business units create “Ghost IT” infrastructure
• Cloud services compliment or replace internal resources
 There’s just a whole lot going on
• IT staff barely keeps up with projects
without worrying about BCDR updates

13. Knowing Where you Stand
 DR plans are the last thing to be considered
• When doing more with less, there’s more that doesn’t get done
• Plans rarely updated as changes are being made
 Even if you have a plan, it’s hard to know the status
• BCDR consultants spend months verifying implementations
• Testing and reporting is often infrequent at best

14. Black or Sweetened
Protection comes in many flavors

15. Recovery Tool Taste Testing
 Recovery tools come in many different flavors
•
•
•
•
Basic backup & recovery
Replication of VM images or storage
Traditional server clustering
Replication with stand-by & failover
 Every blend has its own characteristics
• Differences in RTO & RPO capabilities
• Protection from different kinds of failures
• Widely varying cost to protection ratios

16. A Delicate Balance
 Service Level Agreements
• Business wants to meet certain SLA’s
• Increasing number of threats to business continuity
• Everyone thinks their things are the most important things
 Budgetary constraints
• Face it: Protection costs time, money, resources…
• Hard to justify the expense of
disaster recovery programs
• Not everything is going to
get unlimited protection

17. Building a Better Coffee Maker
 Understand business requirements in great detail
• Reference actual business needs & requirements
• Estimate an application’s “cost of downtime”
• Fully map business service dependencies
 Apply protection appropriately
• Good. Fast. Cheap. (Pick any two.)
 Monitor your results
• Regular testing
• Automation

18. Neverfail IT Continuity Architect
Better coffee. Delivered.

19. Neverfail IT Continuity Architect Dashboard

20. Progress and Summary Reports
 Automatically inventories and
analyzes IT infrastructure
 Summarizes availability and
likelihood to meet SLA’s

21. Multiple Heatmap Views of Inventory
 Color-coded by analysis state, protection, or tier ranking
 Bigger boxes indicate more dependent entities

22. Create and Define Business Services
 Combine dependent entities into ranked business services
 Perform gap analysis between goals and predictions

23. Business Services Dependency Graphs
 View inbound and outbound dependencies for any entity

24. Learn More about IT Continuity Architect
 IT Continuity Architect tech preview registration
• Sign up to be one of the first to try Neverfail IT Continuity Architect
when it becomes available
• http://marketing.neverfailgroup.com/ArchitectComingSoon.html
 IT Continuity Architect introduction video
• This clip gives a high-level overview of the major features of the
Architect product. Subsequent clips will delve into various major
features of the product.
• http://youtu.be/CCclnIxMAoU
 IT Continuity Architect- Discovery and Dependencies
• This video focuses on the discovery process and dependency mapping
in the Architect product.
• http://youtu.be/agzOP8sNuSU

25. Time for a Refill….
Getting ready to wrap this webinar up

26. Visit Neverfail at VMworld 2013
 See IT Continuity Architect live!
• VMworld San Francisco – booth 310
• VMworld Barcelona – booth B413
 See why Neverfail is changing the game in BCDR
• While you’re at there, play our games
• Prize drawing for top scorers
 Bring me another cup of coffee
• Medium roast, black, no sugar
• Thank you

27. Questions and Answers
 Follow us on Spiceworks:
• http://community.spiceworks.com/pages/neverfail
• http://community.spiceworks.com/profile/show/Josh%20@%20Neverfail
 Follow us on Twitter:
• http://twitter.com/NeverfailGroup
• http://twitter.com/JoshMaz
 Visit us online:
• http://www.neverfailgroup.com/
• tel:1-512-327-5777

28. Thank You!
Visit us at www.neverfailgroup.com
Learn and follow for better business continuity

29. Session Abstract: Disaster Recovery shouldn’t
run on late nights and coffee alone.
Like a good cup of coffee, business continuity requires a thoughtful blend of ingredients. As
manager of your IT infrastructure, you're as familiar with your computer inventory as you
are with the handle of your coffee mug. Your business, your customers, however, see only
applications and services and not the machines that make them possible. Understanding
the relationship between business applications and the specific infrastructure that supports
them is critical to creating a really tasty brew.
It could take two pots of coffee just to determine what you have in your computer
inventory, much less why it might be important. In this discussion we will look at the
disconnect between IT and business, and look at ways to help bridge the gap between the
two.
Following this webinar, you’ll understand how business services can be connected with the
underlying IT infrastructure so you can be assured your business continuity plans will always
work. You might also win coffee – really good coffee! But you’ll have to join our chief
storyteller, Josh Mazgelis, to find out:



Why it's important to map business services to IT infrastructure
Understanding risks to disaster recovery capabilities
When to drink it black, and when to add cream and sugar