Reducing waste is a goal that individuals and businesses alike should be striving for. For the eco-friendly business, a little cleaning up will go a long way towards a more robust and cost-effective DR plan. A “green” resource-efficient DR plan comes down to three main steps: consolidate, simplify and virtualize.
1. Consolidate
Consolidating your data reduces your storage needs and eases data recovery efforts. You need to delete unused and duplicate data, documents and images, and archive rarely and infrequently used data. An eco-friendly business brings similar data together in shared storage, and creates filing and catalogue structures to easily find them.
All data storage should be compressed and defragmented, eliminating inaccessible and unusable space. Free and release under-utilized working storage. All trash and recycle bins should be emptied. Wherever possible, centralize your processing for common functions and eliminate multiple computing locations. It is always better to keep common data, systems and functions together rather than scattered around computing facilities.
2. Simplify
Complexity is the enemy of disaster recovery. An eco-friendly business simplifies to reduce the effort of recovery and the risk of failure. Software is a great place to start simplifying. Reduce application instances and multiple versions of software, as well as their accompanying licensing and support. It’s not unusual for a company to have the same application running 12 different ways in 12 different branches. Multi-instance situations like this might be resolved with a better network or a different kind of application architecture.
Of course, all software and firmware needs to be patched or upgraded to the latest release, in order to facilitate support and reduce the risk of failure, especially in the case of disaster. And all “one-off” or obsolete equipment should be eliminated, because the more times your system runs on a unique or an obsolete piece of equipment, the more likely you’ll be consuming resources you don’t need to. Look for hardware with LEDs, low-power use modes, solid-state drives, etc.
3. Virtualize
Virtualization is something an eco-friendly business does by reducing the number of unique physical pieces of equipment, reducing energy consumption, reducing application instances and multiple versions of software. Virtualize storage systems, processing and other functions so that you can reduce racking, storage devices and other specialized appliances. Use a single piece of equipment to house multiple systems, as opposed to propagating physical processors and storage drives for every new application you bring on. Reducing the physical footprint may also reduce your carbon footprint!
Virtualization reduces energy consumption, reduces the effort of recovery, and makes DR more automation (and cloud)-friendly. The eco-friendly business knows that it is easier to float systems over to a recovery site by virtualizing them. It also knows that consolidating and simplifying data handling eases day-to-day operations, while at the same time clearing the path for a more cost-effective DR program.
Consolidation, simplification and virtualization are methods that any business can use, not only to better implement a DR plan, but also to make their business run more efficiently. “Bigger is better” is an appropriate concept when you’re talking about profits or customer lists, but ”less is more” is the way to think when you’re talking about data storage / backup or application systems.
