Server failure and system disaster can happen when you least expect it. 

Not prepared? Your disaster recovery (DR) plan might take longer to implement than it should, impacting your recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs). 

DR orchestration can help in the orderly recovery of your server environment during an outage, making sure that your critical servers, applications and data come online without incident and in an automated fashion. 

Here’s how Cristie DR orchestration can further enhance your business’s resiliency by automating all the stages of your recovery process and taking your DR testing to the next level. 

DR Orchestration explained  

DR orchestration is designed to use automation to simplify your DR plan and improve your business’s resiliency to an IT disaster. 

It goes a step further than automated recoveries by giving you the ability to plan out and configure in advance all the stages required to get your business-critical systems back up and running after a server disaster. 

DR Orchestration at Cristie

At Cristie, our DR orchestration feature is included as one of the value-add features of the Cristie Virtual Appliance (VA). Both the VA and DR orchestration are free to use for all our system recovery and replication customers. 

As with our Recovery Testing feature, we use automation to save time and management overhead on your recoveries across your estate. The difference is that with DR orchestration, we can also apply to this to the other stages of the recovery process. 

How orchestration works

Each orchestration job runs through a series of stages; and within each stage we can run as many different tasks as we like in parallel. 

For example, we can run replication or recovery tasks (with recoveries straight from your TSM, Dell or Cohesity backup server), reboots, scripts and reporting tasks that give you a detailed summary of the orchestration job. 

We can even do things like add in manual tasks, which will stop the automation whilst a manual task is performed (such as loading a tape drive), before continuing the orchestration once that task has been completed. 

Using automation to save time and enhance your DR testing

All of this is designed to use automation to save you time when it matters most, minimising human interaction and the chance for human error in what’s historically been a very manual process. 

DR Orchestration can also be used to enhance your DR Testing regime, as not only are you able to test the recoveries, you can also test the surrounding processes required to get your business back up and running. 

By being able to test the surrounding processes, like the system reboot, cross application integration or any post-boot scripts, you can spot and fix any issues in advance on the entire process, before you need them in a real-world DR scenario. 

This means that should you then need to recover for real, you can be confident in your ability to quickly and easily recover your business-critical systems. 

Schedule your DR orchestration jobs in advance

As with our Recovery Testing feature, DR Orchestration jobs can be configured and scheduled months in advance, with full email reporting on successes and failures that can be used for auditory, compliance, industry regulations or if you’re a service provider, as part of your reporting to your customer. 

Because of our use of automation and scheduling, you have the ability to perform this level of testing across the entirety of your estate. 

Summary

We hope this has given you some insight into how Cristie’s DR Orchestration can help your business improve its resiliency. 

If you’d like to find out more about any of our products, visit cristie.com or book a free trial here. You can also see our software in action on our YouTube channel.