Overview
Should disaster strike, IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Service (BCRS) enables customers to back up and recover key business processes in a BCRS data center. It is standard practice to run a rehearsal of the disaster recovery at least once a year. These rehearsals are the major activity in the BCRS data centers, consuming significant administrative resources and equipment. Today, most of the operations involved in setting up a rehearsal are manual: collecting customer information in worksheets, inspecting and allocating resources, setting up servers, network, and storage, and deploying operating systems and fixes. In practice, because systems are allocated to a user for the duration of a rehearsal, the average server CPU utilization is low, even though a data center may be highly utilized.
AVOIR (Automated Virtualized Optimized and Intelligent Recovery) is an IBM Research project targeted at improving disaster recovery rehearsals by exploiting the new possibilities enabled by virtualization. AVOIR supports a global end-to-end approach that automates the process of a rehearsal, helps move the customer from a "ready to test" to a "ready to recover" state, and leverages emerging Virtualization and Systems Management for recovery - even for customers who do not deploy virtualization in production.
AVOIR automates the transformation of a customer's production environment into virtual resources in a BCRS center. This end-to-end automation process starts by capturing the customer's inventory. It then analyzes the requirements and possible resource mappings, optimizes the schedule and actual mapping, and ultimately orchestrates the deployment into BCRS resources. This automation has the following benefits:
- Simplify the administrative effort required today for environment setup towards a customer's rehearsal.
- Decrease human errors and the time spent fixing them, and ease the dependency on special administration expertise.
- Improve resource utilization through optimized resource mapping and by shortening the time window for a rehearsal.
Since some customer organizations currently make limited or no use of virtualization, the full technology benefits are possible via a reliable physical to virtual (P-2-V) transformation from the physical production servers into virtual servers at the BCRS center. This process involves setting up virtual servers with their storage and virtual networks, converting OS images, and deploying them to the virtual servers. The AVOIR system and process aim to deliver a dramatic change for BCRS. This vision means that setting a transformed customer's environment can be done with the 'push of a button', arriving at new level of resource utilization and scalability.