It isn’t often in our sector that something genuinely transformational comes along and revolutionises the industry. We think we have achieved this with our new Recovery Execution System (RES), an invention so original that Sungard Availability Services is in the process of patenting it.
Traditional recovery of hybrid IT environments requires a lot of manual processes to understand the customer’s production environment, build and maintain a recovery environment at time of test or disaster and keep the two perfectly aligned throughout its lifecycle.
Not any more! Sungard AS has obliterated all of the manual recovery processes and, uniquely, automated recovery from start to finish. On average, this change cuts recovery time by 70%. Yes 70%.
So how do we do it? (Here comes the technical bit)
Our Managed Recovery Programme (MRP) is a systematic approach to recovery that holistically encompasses the people, process and governance elements involved and leverages technology to achieve the required recovery outcome. Its comprehensive scope includes discovery of the customer production environment and application dependencies, design of the recovery strategy and plans, at time of test or disaster execution of recovery and ongoing lifecycle management.
Traditionally, recovery execution has involved maintaining and executing manual recovery procedures – a process that is both resource-intensive and prone to human error. Based on our extensive experience of successfully recovering customers, we have invented an innovative automation process – Recovery Execution System (RES)1 – solely for MRP customers.
MRP leverages automated Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) technology to address the customer’s pain point of identifying production layout and keeping up with lifecycle changes. This allows the customer recovery configuration to be kept up-to-date in a Sungard AS-hosted and managed Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
MRP powered by RES now dynamically reads the recovery configuration from the CMDB and automatically generates the recovery workflow – the set of instructions used to execute the recovery at time of test or disaster – on the fly. While there are other systems on the market today that automate the discovery process and map dependencies, we have taken the concept to the next level by using the information contained in the CMDB to automatically generate and execute the entire recovery workflow process, eliminating the need for manual development and maintenance of procedure documents.
Automating the recovery process in this way has many benefits:
- Cuts recovery time by up to 70%. This is made possible due to automated provisioning, building, configuring and restoring of hosts.
- Eliminates the risk of human error. Instead of laboriously drawing up recovery procedures manually, RES automatically generates a methodical, step-by-step recovery workflow which is then executed by IT process orchestration technology. Consequently, it ensures repeatable results and improved recoverability.
- Enables skilled resources to focus on complex recovery issues. If the recovery process stalls for any reason or the system encounters data corruption, the system instantly produces an IT trouble ticket for immediate attention by our skilled service engineers to resolve before resuming the automated execution.
- Enables better end user validation testing. As tests and recoveries are performed in a fraction of the time with RES, there is more time available during a recovery exercise for end user validation and acceptance testing by the customer.
Although the RES orchestration framework is initially being used for recovery purposes, work is underway to explore the feasibility of extending it to other use cases such as data centre migration and an ‘appliance’ mode that allows it to work outside a Sungard Availability Services setting.
Already live in the US, RES (patent pending) is scheduled to become available for MRP customers across Europe in the first half of 2016.
To find out more about MRP or how RES works, please contact your account manager in the first instance, call 0800 143 413 or email infoavail@sungardas.com