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Five Steps to Evaluating Business Continuity Services

A do-it-yourself approach to business continuity has its advantages but isnt right for everyone.

“If you look at mainframe-based recovery, there are really only two players in the world that can do that—IBM and SunGard,” says John Morency, research director at Gartner. “HP tends to focus more on the professional design, integration and consulting services around disaster recovery and continuity.”

Smaller services players such as Rentsys Recovery Services are also making inroads into the market. The Houston-based company, historically a business equipment rental company, has grown its offerings to include mobile recovery data centers. The company can deploy large tractor-trailers equipped with electrical power, satellite communications, PCs, faxes and other equipment anywhere in the country to recover customer service operations or anything else. IBM and HP both subcontract their mobile recovery services to Rentsys, while SunGard has its own trailer fleet of 30 mobile data centers.

3 Let recovery requirements dictate the level of dedicated BC services.

Subscribing to a data recovery service that you can trigger when a disaster strikes is fine if data can be restored in two to four days. But increasingly, as businesses require 24/7/365 availability, more dedicated data recovery services are required.

“If you have to recover within 24 hours, that requires some form of dedicated infrastructure in terms of remote SAN [storage area network]. If you’re using asynchronous replication or data mirroring, you’ve got to have fixed assets that are using the data backup,” Gartner’s Morency says. “You have to have that space on a dedicated basis because when disaster strikes, you need to get your staff out quickly and be able to get everything up quickly.”

That’s at odds with the shared capacity model, especially in the case of a regional disaster like Hurricane Katrina or a major earthquake, where multiple businesses declare disasters at the same time. After all, if everybody needs the same rented facility at the same time, somebody is going to be out of luck. Companies that can’t afford to wait their turn are either evaluating building their own facilities or looking for service providers that can meet their needs.

These faster recovery requirements are bringing new players into the market. Colocation vendors such as NaviSite in Andover, Mass.; Equinix in Foster City, Calif.; and Houston-based VeriCenter are capitalizing on increased demand for data center space.

Organizations that already use SunGard, IBM and HP “are engaging with colocation providers to rent floor space where they can put two to three racks, their SAN equipment and server equipment in the cage in a dedicated facility,” Morency explains. “All they’re doing is renting floor space and communications capacity. In many cases, it can provide a more available service either at the same cost or at a lower cost [than full-service business continuity providers]. It gives those businesses more predictability in responding to disasters and supporting those [24 hour or less] recovery times.”