How to Eliminate Configuration Drift Risk

In today's highly stressed IT environments, unanticipated and unwanted downtime still happens. A high availability (HA) infrastructure for processors and storage is one of your best protections. Yet, even an HA infrastructure can drift as configuration changes are implemented, manual adjustments are made, new releases of software and firmware are applied, and underlying business processes evolve. The result is that too many IT organizations are falling short of meeting their uptime requirements. In response, a new class of disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) solutions have recently emerged that are designed to provide customers with the ability to identify and proactively correct these potential threats, thus eliminating this risk of downtime and ensuring that service level (SLA) objectives are met.

Learning Objectives

• How to choose the best DR/HA management solution for your unique environment – including what questions to ask your vendor regarding installation, integration and monitoring/manageability features and functionality.
• How to utilize a DR/HA management solution to detect infrastructure optimization opportunities, such as unallocated or unused storage that can be reclaimed, changes to replication configurations that will result in lower bandwidth consumption, as well as information and applications stored on expensive disk resources that can be archived to lower cost alternatives.
• How to transition DR and HA testing from an expensive and time consuming point-in-time event to a continuous ongoing capability that provides dramatic budgetary savings as well.