781.826.7989

sales@newcomglobal.com

www.NEWCOMGlobal.com

Easy Disaster Recovery TieringThe IT Hero’s Guide to Tiering 911 Call Center Applications Reduce costs and improve resilience for your Disaster Recovery plan

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The Super Simple Basics: Smart Tiering is cost-effective and easy to implement

If you are like most IT professionals, you know what application tiering means, but have

probably not defined things like RTO (Recovery Time Objective) / RPO (Recovery Point

Objective) / Tiers, or do not have agreement on definitions with your dispatch center

leaders. You may think doing so requires a six figure project with a big five consulting

firm and are trying to make do without getting too far into specifying a viable tiered DR

(Disaster Recovery) architecture.

In fact, that level of effort is not required, and not developing a tiered DR solution is

actually more expensive than putting one together. Especially in a 911 call center where

the stakes are high.

Tiering is valuable for everyone, not just for large enterprises and global corporations.

Any organization can use the same basic approach and best practices – if they have the

right partner – without needing a huge team of people and a six figure budget.

Public safety agencies of any size can implement a solid, multi-tier BCDR (Business

Continuity and Disaster Recovery) architecture. Doing so reduces their one-time and

ongoing costs and improves the overall resiliency of their systems at the same time.

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Keep It SimpleTiering is all about figuring out how long your 911 call center systems and services can

afford to go without having access to the applications users depend on to protect and

serve. The reality is your operation uses some mission critical applications, like CAD, all

day, every day. There are others however, that you only need from time to time.

While it’s technically feasible to use the same level of protection for every application, it’s

not cost-effective and often means under-protecting more critical applications. The trick

is dividing your applications into four groups, or tiers, and then implementing the right

amount of protection for each tier.

The bottom line is that making smart choices in setting up your tiers can save money

while improving the ability of your dispatch operations to withstand any type of outage or

disaster.

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We’ve worked with thousands of 911 call centers to help them devise the best disaster

recovery and business continuity strategies for their operations. Time after time, we’ve

seen that the key element in developing a successful strategy is super simple:

• Get the right people in one room and spend a few hours on a whiteboard asking the

right questions.

• Keep your team small — find people who understand how the applications they use

affect overall operations. This is often the managers for each department, but your

agency might be different. The key point is to find a time when you can bring the right

people together for a discussion.

• Use a whiteboard to write down all applications that your processes and services

depend on to operate. As a group, decide how long the system can continue

operating without each application. (For example, the records management system

might be able to be unavailable for a few hours without harming operations, while a

CAD system has to be up and working all the time.) Remember, these decisions are

not really about data protection – any good disaster recovery system will protect your

data. These decisions are about ensuring things like emergency response and call

dispatch.

You want to spend as little as possible in order to protect everything to the appropriate

level. The team’s job is figure out what that level is for each application.

White Board Magic

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Then do some simple triage. Mark each application as belonging to one of these three

groups, or tiers:

1. Those you can’t live without for more than 1-2 hours

2. Those you can’t live without for more than 4 hours

3. Those you can’t live without for more than half a day

4. Those you can live without for a longer time if you can be certain the data is safe

Protecting applications in the last 2 groups is the least expensive, so the group members

should bargain with each other a bit to try and put as many applications into these

groups as possible.

That’s it! You don’t need an outside consultant to do this for you, and you should be able

to complete the process in a couple of hours. At the end of this exercise, you will have

defined application tiers that ensure you do not overspend or under protect again, and

agency-made agreement and buy in (which makes the funding process easier).

The next step is to have your IT team work with your DR/BC vendor to select the best

solutions and implement the plan. When selecting the appropriate solutions for each tier

of application, you must start by understanding all of the different stages that make up

an outage, and why many of the “15 minute failover” promises you are bombarded with

every week are not the answer. If you haven’t read our “Anatomy of an Outage” eGuide

yet, you can learn all of that and more here.

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NEWCOM is here to help You can access NEWCOM’s many years of experience to make this process even better.

Our team of experts has seen it all. They will work alongside your team to help you avoid

under protecting your operations or overpaying.

Don’t worry – we don’t charge for this work! If you request our help, we’ll guide you

through a proven, informed decision-making process that will provide quick value to you

and your systems and services. Together, we can qualify your applications and decide

which level of protection is the best fit.

Whether you’ve developed the basic strategy on your own or with our help, we’ll work

with you to refine it and turn your decisions into practical next steps. We’ll help you

assemble a budget and a timeline for the whole project. More importantly, we will make

sure your agency is always protected at the appropriate levels and you are a hero!

Now let’s look at each tier in more detail.

These are the lowest tiers and are for your non-critical systems. A simple

test: Are you more concerned about protecting the data or making sure the

application never goes down? Nearly every public safety agency has several

systems that they can afford to live without for a day or more.

For example, your internal HR system is important, but if you weren’t able to

access it for a little while, it doesn’t mean you have to shut down.

Basically, your focus on Tier 3 and 4 systems is on protecting the data itself. In

technical terms, we would say that your RPO is a lot more important than your

RTO.

For Tier 3 and 4 systems, NEWCOM recommends a comprehensive backup

and recovery system that will protect critical data, no matter what happens to

your call centers or your computers. But – and this is an important but – you

won’t spend a dollar more than you have to in order to achieve that. Tiers 3

and 4 are your least expensive options and you’ll want to use that for as many

systems as possible.

Keep in mind, though, that it may take several hours – as long as working day -

to bring systems protected at the Tier 3 or 4 level back up.

Tier 3-4 The least expensive protection for your data-centric applications

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Tier 3: Backup for data-centric applications

Data-centric backup solutions utilizing a second location (yours or

a CJIS certified cloud provider for example) is generally sufficient

for Tier 3 applications. NEWCOM recommends Veeam Backup

& Replication for this tier, back ended by a Neverfail HybriStor

appliance – market leading deduplication and compression

technology that is a Veeam Ready certified storage repository.

It’s perfect for applications that are not that critical to your operation,

but that you need to be able to access fairly quickly — within less

than a day or two — in the event of a disaster or major outage. The

Veeam solution allows flexibility in meeting these demands, as well

as any retention requirements for compliance or otherwise, and

HybriStor ensures scale and speed of recovery with an average

of 8-10X less data needing to be stored on disk and the ability

to instantly restore without going through a lengthy rehydration

process.

Tier 4: Archive for long term data storage

Think of Tier 4 as cold storage. This is the least expensive way to

protect archival data that you might not ever need to access again.

For example, you may want to protect compliance-based retention

data from years ago with Tier 4. If, for any reason, you do need to

get at those old records, the data will always be available and you’ll

be spending as little as possible to ensure that.

What’s the Difference Between Tier 3 and Tier 4?In terms of the white board exercise described above, it’s useful to

group applications that will ultimately be assigned to Tier 3 and Tier

4 in the same “bucket”. The functional differences between these

tiers are fairly minor, and, by putting your less important applications

into the same group, your decision-making process will be less time-

consuming for everyone involved.

Once you have decided which applications will go into this group,

your IT people can work with NEWCOM engineering team to develop

a detailed implementation plan, including final decisions on which

applications will utilize Tier 3 or Tier 4 level protection.

This intermediate tier is for the systems that are important to keep up and

running with as little downtime as possible, but that are not mission-critical

and do not require the same level of investment. For example, records

management is important to most dispatch centers, but many centers can live

without it for a few hours.

Systems protected at the Tier 2 level should be back up and running in two to

four hours or less. There are several ways you can configure Tier 2 protection.

For example, in order to keep costs as low as possible, you may look to a

cloud-based protection strategy that utilizes a smaller standby resource pool

– you may not need servers on standby with exactly the same specs as your

production systems. In this case, you can bring your systems back online

using the least expensive standby resources that will support your needs.

Your people will get access to the Tier 2 systems and be working productively

again quickly. This gives you as much time as you need to take care of fixing

or replacing your production systems, which you can then switch over to as

soon as they’re ready.

Think of Tier 2 as a happy medium, or “just right” protection for many of

your most commonly used systems. In fact, 50% or more of your applications

may be perfectly fine with a smart combination of Tier 2 and Tier 3 and 4

protection.

Tier 2Goldilocks protection for important applications

Tier 1 is for applications that you can tolerate having down for 1-2 hours, but

will have significant negative impact on your operations if they are out of

commission for too long.

Tier 1 is application-aware, which means your Tier 1 applications should

be monitored and issues should first be corrected when possible. To keep

costs as low as possible for Tier 1, we don’t recommend keeping a fully

duplicated set of computing resources running for you on hot stand-by, but the

application awareness and monitoring against downtime events is critical to

public safety.

However, you can manually add more resources to the failover systems as

needed in order to utilize them effectively during an outage. When the outage

is over and your production environment is back up and running, you can turn

down the failover site’s resources again to a minimal level so you’re prepared

for the next outage.

Tier 1 does require some manual intervention to optimize the failover servers

for production use, and that is one of the factors that keeps Tier 1 costs

affordable. But, this tier is often the right fit on systems like jail management.

Tier 1 High Availability for critical applications

Tier 0 offers the highest level of protection and is intended for applications

that are truly mission critical; that is, you can’t afford for them to ever go down.

For example, if you are a 911 call center, you can’t afford to ever have your call

dispatch systems stop working.

Neverfail has developed a set of highly specialized solutions that can

absolutely ensure that an application is always online, no matter what. If

there’s a major hurricane, earthquake, or fire that destroys your buildings and

all your servers, a Tier 0-protected system can still stay up and accessible – all

your people will need is an internet connection and a computer.

Essentially, with Tier 0 protection, warm standbys are kept running all the time,

in lock step with their production counterparts. These solutions are hardware,

virtual platform, storage, and location agnostic. If something happens to your

facilities, your applications fail over to another server, or even another location,

to ensure your users can continue to work as normal and your services

continue. This approach bypasses recovery altogether by ensuring continuity.

Of course, Tier 0 is a more expensive protection option and you should only

use it for applications that you can’t afford to ever lose access to. Again, most

organizations don’t need Tier 0 protection for many of their applications, but

for those that do, Neverfail has you covered.

Tier 0 Super Protection for mission critical systems

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Avoid vendor sprawl with NEWCOM NEWCOM has the tools and expertise you need to fully protect all of your applications

and data repositories for the least amount of money, and from a single partner. That

means one bill, one support team, and additional savings and scale for your 911 dispatch

center.

Once you’ve worked out a plan, either with our help on your own, we’ll work together

to develop an implementation schedule that won’t disrupt your operations. The whole

process – from initial consultation through to first tests and completed deployment –

takes weeks, not months.

Contact NEWCOM

781.826.7989

sales@newcomglobal.com

www.NEWCOMGlobal.com