Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for users of IT technical services. In this issue:
• The human side of business continuity planning
• Tech View: Thick and thin storage
• 10 costs of a poor business continuity strategy
• B & M ProTech
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The human side of Business Continuity Planning
Jerry Smart considers the importance of a sometimes overlooked area of business continuity planning – the people
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Human resources are vital to business continuity
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It is widely accepted that the timely and effective management of IT system outages is critical to business success. You have only to look at the cost of a systems failure in terms of lost sales, dissatisfied customers and the resulting effect on a company’s reputation to justify the development of a business continuity programme. A TechRepublic article cites a Gartner estimate that puts the average cost of downtime at $42,000 per hour.
However, what isn’t always so evident is the cost associated with the failure to plan effectively for the human element involved in business continuity programmes. Companies generally have plans to cover the technical aspects essential for systems recovery, but those plans don’t always ensure that all of the people whose work generates business profits are connected and able to complete their work.
A recent survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that barely one third of organisations recognise human resources to be a significant component of their business continuity planning. This study is supported by research conducted by Forrester which found that while almost 70% of North American and European organizations have plans in place to recover data centres and communications, less than 25% of them feel that they have planned to support and recover their workforces. It shouldn’t come as a surprise therefore that the report concluded that “workforce continuity” must be integrated into any successful Business Continuity Plan.
The primary objective of continuity planning is to ensure the stability of critical business operations, minimise recovery time in the event of a disaster and fulfil legal obligations. So if disasters such as a pandemic, transport strikes, a natural disaster or other major event prevent the workforce from reaching a corporate facility, the business continuity strategy must enable people with the necessary skills and expertise to connect to the systems, applications, data and communications they need, from wherever they may be.
To discuss your IT staff contingency planning contact B & M on 0118 981 1880 or email sales@bmeurope.com.
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Tech View: in the thick of it - storage for virtualised environments
B & M Technical Manager Paul Smith considers the virtues of thick and thin storage provisioning in virtualised environments
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IT heads who want to deliver cost efficiencies are increasingly looking at Virtualisation as a way of delivering reduced costs and enhanced performance. However, rationalising your processor partitions into a more cost effective scenario only works if you also do the same for storage; there is no point in saving money in one area simply to overspend it elsewhere. Disk Storage is probably as cheap per gigabyte as it has ever been, but large amounts of storage still cost large amounts of money - and don’t forget that you also need the physical space and cooling systems to go with all of this.
As an example, if it is assumed that 1TB of storage is allocated to a server, it would seem to make sense that you would therefore need 3TB of storage for 3 images (or virtualised servers). If however each image actually only requires 200GB, 500GB and 300GB respectively, you would have 2TB sitting around unused. This practice, often known as ‘thick’ provisioning, would mean that each partition may be unable to expand beyond its initial storage allocation.
The technique of ‘Thin’ provisioning on the other hand allocates storage dynamically, allowing the storage to be used much more efficiently, so in practice you might only need 1.5TB of physical data, backing 3TB of potential requirements. Software is used to provide a virtualisation layer, automatically mapping the Virtual File Store to the Physical File Store. In reality the amounts of storage would, of course, be very much larger, but this illustrates the point.
Thin provisioning also allows you to implement ‘Just-In-Time’ storage, whereby you can hot-plug extra real storage as needed. This enables you to build a much more efficient storage system saving physical space, power and money.
Software such as IBM’s Director: Virtualization Manager allows intelligent storage control for the systems supported on zSeries platforms. IBM’s solutions also explicitly work in tandem with VMware and XEN virtualisation software to maximise enterprise resilience. Many other manufacturers such as HP, HDS and NetApp offer a variety of hardware and software solutions which perform similar functions.
In the next issue of B & M Specialist Bulletin, we will complete our series on storage for virtualised environments by looking at the networks needed to support them.
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10 greatest costs of a poor business continuity strategy
With estimates of major IT systems downtime costing between $40,000 and some $1,000,000 an hour (META group 2002), it is no wonder that business continuity is high on every enterprise’s list of priorities
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These are some of the areas of greatest impact:
- Lost revenue / sales
- Reduced employee productivity
- Regulatory penalties
- Reduced profitability
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Loss of reputation of the business /damage to brand
- Damage to supplier relationships
- Ruined goods (especially perishable goods)
- Employee frustration and lower morale
- Loss of market share
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B & M ProTech
Total project delivery
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B & M ProTech delivers technical projects tailored to meet each customer’s ICT needs. We work closely with customers to agree whether the best solution is resources that are managed in-house, or to reduce risk by having B & M manage the project team on the customer’s behalf via a professional project manager.
Whichever form of management is appropriate, B & M ProTech delivers multi-disciplined teams with consistently high levels of technical knowledge and expertise who work to pre-agreed levels of service.
All technical projects are delivered in compliance with our best practice standards.
For more information on B & M ProTech please contact sales@bmeurope.com.
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