“The network is down;” one of the most soul crushing phrases for a network administrator to hear. The crash could be caused by anything—it could be the server, storage, or user error. However, IT Directors and C-Level’s never care what caused the issue, they only want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. That task falls squarely on the shoulders of network administrators.
In the event of a networking malfunction, device by device, switch by switch, location by location (e.g. DRPs or remote locations) need to be checked until the issue is identified. All while the phone is ringing off the hook with angry employees wondering when they will be able to return to work.
According to Gartner, the average cost of a single minute of IT downtime is $5,600, which means more than $330,000 gone in an hour!
In today’s multi-cloud world, this gets even worse. Multiple data centers to manage along with multiple form factors like Physical, Virtual, Container-Based and Public Cloud environments, a potential outage can quickly become a nightmare to troubleshoot.
In the old days, before Software Defined Infrastructure technologies, network administrators could only rely on the hardware redundancy and confidence a specific brand would provide.
Today, features like ACI Rollbacks (which apply a working configuration from a previous snapshot where everything was working fine) allow the recovery of a complex network with several locations, form-factors and devices in just 3 seconds!
As stated previously, it is not only the network to blame, so leveraging technologies that could do what ACI does for Compute and Storage is now possible with solutions like CIsco HyperFlex and Veeam.
Instead of restoring full LUNs or Datastores from traditional backup solutions to the main storage to recover from a corrupt database for example (which can take hours or days), network administrators can now leverage Instant Recovery Capabilities based on the HyperFlex Snapshots which are constantly taken. This allows Veeam to publish the VM, File or even Application Object (such as e-mails, OUs from Active Directory and others) directly from the Backup Repository.
In today’s hyper available world, it is not enough to prevent risk with redundant environments only. Hyperconverged technologies allow network administrators to react and recover from a network failure quickly. By implementing a solution that allows your business to recover from a network error in 3 seconds—you can avoid having to deal with endless troubleshooting and not-so-friendly phone calls.
