Recently I wrote a blog post as part of a series that explored the importance of availability to a modern data platform, especially in a world were our reliance on technology is ever increasing, from the way we operate our business, to the way we live our lives and how the digitally focussed businesses can no longer tolerate downtime, planned or unplanned in the way they could even 5 years ago (you can read that post here).

So how do we mitigate against the evils of downtime? That’s simple, we build recovery and continuity plans to ensure that our system remain on regardless of the events that go on around it, from planned maintenance to the very much unplanned disaster. But there’s the problem, these things aren’t simple, are they?

I’ve recently worked on a project where we’ve been doing exactly this, building DR and continuity plans in the more “traditional” way, writing scripts, policies and procedures to ensure that in the event of some kind of disaster the systems could be recovered quickly and meet stringent recovery time and point objectives. What this project reminded me of is how difficult these things are, keeping your documentation up to date, making sure your scripts are followed and ensuring you can fully test these plans, is tricky.

With that in mind the recent product announcement from Veeam of their new Availability Orchestrator solution, caught my attention, a solution that promises to automate and orchestrate not only the delivery of a DR solution, but also automating its documentation and testing, this was something that I needed to understand more and thought I wouldn’t be the only one.

So that is the topic of this weeks podcast, as serial guest Michael Cade, Global Technologist at Veeam, joins me to provide an insight into Availability Orchestrator, what challenges it addresses, why Veeam thought it was important to develop and how it can help you deliver better availability to your critical systems.

During the show Michael shares some insight into understanding your availability gap and why today business cannot tolerate downtime of key systems as well as the difficulties that come with maintaining a robust and appropriate strategy.

We explore the challenges of testing when the business doesn’t want downtime, how to keep track of all of the little tricks that our tech team keep in their heads how to get that into a continuity plan.

We finish up looking at how Availability Orchestrator can help, by providing a automation and orchestration solution to automate testing, documentation and execution of our continuity plans and how it can also be a tool to help us build test and dev environments, as well as help us to migrate to cloud platforms like VMware on AWS.

Availability Orchestrator, in my opinion, is a very powerful tool, having just worked on a continuity and DR project, the challenges that come with manually maintaining these plans are still very fresh in my mind and had this tool been available when I started that project it would certainly of been worthy of investigation into how it could help.

If you want to find out more about Veeam availability orchestrator, check out the Veeam Website.

You can follow Michael on twitter @MichaelCade1

And if you’d like to read his blog series on Veeam replication you’ll find that on his blog site starting here.

Hope you’ve found the show useful.

Thanks for listening.