Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Providing a Menu
A noticeable trend seen across industries is that the budget for IT initiatives is slowly
moving away from IT and into the business. Shadow IT is now getting a budget. So what
does this mean for IT administrators? This means that we are going to need to become
better at communicating to the business the capabilities of the infrastructure and the
options the business units and application owners have when it comes to protecting their
applications. Remember the “everything as a service” comments we made in previous
chapters? If this trend continues, over time the business and application owners are
going to want a menu to choose from when it comes to their applications—much like the
menu they get when they go to a cloud provider.
Based on the previous trend information and as part of your database virtualization
project, it is important to quantify and qualify the availability options available to the
business. As we will discuss throughout this chapter, a variety of options are available
to protect applications and the application stack. As this chapter unfolds, you will begin
to place the availability options into buckets, such as disaster recovery, business
continuity, high availability, hypervisor-level protection, operating system-level
protection, application-level protection, and others. Based on your business and the
trends going on inside your organization, it is important to understand and present the
right options to the application owner.
It is important that the business understands what the options are and how those options
translate in terms of availability, recovery, cost, and accountability. It is important that
they understand what is included and what is not included with their selections.
Interview the business to get a full picture as to the importance of the application.
Tip
You want the business to define the application's requirements for availability,
recoverability, downtime, and so on. It is easier to justify the cost of an
availability solution when the business is driving the requirements.
Come at this from multiple angles. The application itself may not be that important on
the surface, but the systems it interacts with may be very important and therefore change
how the application should be protected. It is your job to be consultative during this
process.
How to get started? Simple, generate a list of questions you need the answers to in order
to provide a consultative recommendation to the business. Make this a living document,
and do not be afraid to go back and interview an application owner again. Questions to
ask the business include the following:
Do people's lives depend on this application? (This would be the case for a
