A key feature of the Déjà Vu HA/BC System is that it is non-intrusive vis-à-vis your network, thus neither a live demonstration nor the final installation carries a risk of compromising your existing network or data in any way.
Following are the key steps from our initial contact with your network to the fail-over and recovery test which proves our performance and triggers the effectiveness of our contracts. The technical steps have been simplified in order to stay focused on those which require interaction with your network in any way.
Interaction will happen in three phases, involving the following basic steps:
Phase I. Installation and Initialization. (Déjà Vu is deployed at your premises, connections to your network and our data center are made, initial data synchronization is completed, replication initiated.)
- We deliver our standard Déjà Vu Remote Processing Unit (RPU), an enclosure consisting mostly of pre-configured gear about the size of half a data center rack. Essentially plug and play, it receives encrypted, streamed data from the your primary or back up server, including applications as selected by you. (We currently support only Microsoft applications.)
- Concurrently, we make replication software available to you; it will be downloaded by you and installed on your primary server. There are dozens of such tools on the market that have been proven to be clean, non-intrusive and reliable. IT managers routinely use them for simply replicating to redundant servers within any network and you may very well have one already running on your system before our arrival. One of the best is licensed by NSI (used by IBM, HP and SunGard). NSI will be installed and configured to transport your selected applications to our RPU, as well as stream new and "differential data" in real time. No modifications to your hardware is required. If no replication software is already used before Déjà Vu is installed, NSI will be the only new software added to the your system as a part of our installation. From this point to the fail-over we will have no further direct interaction with your network.
- We attach the Déjà Vu RPU to our Network Attached Storage (NAS) and begin the synchronization process to mirror your backups with an identical (encrypted) volume of your data at our secure data center.
- Upon completion of synchronization we initiate the ongoing replication mode (where only new and changed data are sent across the Virtual private Network (VPN) to our NAS.)
At this point we are ready for a fail over test (to be initiated by you, using a pre-agreed protocol).
Phase II. (Enables you to have near-immediate access to selected applications and data residing on our SAN.)
- Upon receiving and confirming your fail-over request, we
- immediately "freeze" and
- replicate the active volume of live data to our recovery SAN, bring our standby blade server online with your operating system, and
- attach it to our recovery SAN to deliver services to your users until you are ready to "fail back" to your repaired network.
You will now have 100% access to all your data and applications. Since this is only a test of the fail-over, your primary servers and data were not affected. The fail-over can be objectively evaluated against a pre-agreed Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in the range of 3-30 minutes. After a real fail-over, you could proceed with your network diagnosis and repair process while your productivity is unimpaired.
Phase III. Recovery -- test or real.
(Enables availability of all applications and data as of the fail-over -- to be recovered to your designated Recovery Site.)
- You designate the Recovery Site -- which can be back to your headquarters or any alternate site.
- We initiate the "reverse synchronization" with the designated Recovery Site either through the VPN or by shipping the most recently available server image to you, or both. Upon completion, the Recovery will be objectively evaluated against the pre-agreed Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in the range of 4-14 hours (for 50 GB of highly compressed data). Of course, during a real recovery the data would be sent to your newly live servers.
As can be readily seen, Déjà Vu is not intrusive during installation, initialization, and fail-over and even during a test recovery. Of course, during an actual recovery, our "intrusiveness" is exactly what you are paying for...assured business continuity within your RPO and RTO parameters.
Advantages of Non-intrusiveness
We will install the Déjà Vu system as described above and deliver an agreed RPO and RTO, with Zero Data Loss up to the time we freeze your image (data) in the manner as described above.
When you are able to successfully access the data after the Fail-over and recovery (within the respective RPO and RTO parameters), your lease and service contracts will become binding.
Before an installation and test, clients enter into 3 year conditional contracts including an equipment lease and a service contract. The contracts become binding upon satisfaction of the RPO / RTO / Zero Data Loss test criteria. The equipment lessor must pre-approve credit and lease terms. The client will make a refundable deposit equal to the first and last month's lease payment into a trust account. Upon successful completion of the tests the lease will become binding, the first month's payment on our service contract will be due, and the system will be fully operational.
Benefits for your company:
- You never have your network, mission critical servers or data "at risk."
- You incur no cost unless the pre-agreed RPO / RTO are met with Zero Data Loss.
- The pre-agreed RPO / RTO parameters result in a positive ROI.
- Your business operations are free from network outages.
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