I believe that when you are thinking of buying a DR orchestration tool you should get a proof of concept (PofC) that shows you how it works and that it does work.
If you are lucky you can get a PofC from someone that is not just a Sales SE but knows about BCDR too. This means you can learn more than just how to use the software. Here are some examples:
- How tools can help you find dependencies in apps so that you can be more confident in packaging them in the DR tool. This means a test failover, or a failover will work.
- Have meetings with app owners to determine the failover time they can deal with. This will influence your replication settings.
- During your meetings with app owners find out who the best support person is for each app so you can get good help when you are first packaging the apps in the DR tool.
- It is important to have the person that declares an emergency and triggers the failover to practice and if people are missing who else they can talk with.
- Some applications should not be protected with DR tools. They have High Availability (HA) options that are possible and are much better than DR orchestration. Failover times can be in the seconds. Sometimes applications can be global and have fancy load balancers in front and sometimes that means they don’t need to be protected either.
- DR orchestration tools can failover fast, or slow so it is good to know the difference.
- In a real crisis things get pretty exciting and people focus on what they are doing so sometimes it is very handy to put information into the report template so when people do a failover they will see the info. Things like where to find food, or keys to get into places, or application specialists to call.
- Practice makes things work much better so lots of practice with the tool is key.
- Once you are comfortable with the tool you can do things like a test failover and test application or OS updates. Once you are done you can close the test and now know how things will work in the production environment.
- You should talk with upper managment, sometimes even the CEO, and learn the order of apps to recover, or maybe the top 2 or 3 apps to be done first.
BTW, the products I know and like are: Site Recovery Manager, Veeam Availability Orchestrator, and HCC from Cleondris.
I hope that this helps. I am very open to questions and comments. You can find all my BCDR articles via this URL: https://notesfrommwhite.net/tag/bcdr/
Michael
