Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor

Symantec, a long time player in the virtualiation technology market, has just launched the Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor. It is designed to help organizations evaluate their disaster recovery plans by scanning the organization's IT infrastructure and comparing what it sees to a very large knowledgebase of potential problems.

The knowledge base includes potential issues with:

• Operating systems: Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) and Windows
• Databases: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and IBM DB2
• Clustering managers: Veritas Cluster Server, IBM HACMP, Microsoft Cluster Server and SunClusters
• Storage virtualization:
  • Storage arrays from EMC, NetApp and Hitachi
  • Replication from EMC, NetApp and Hitachi
  • Volume management that is part of the supported operating systems as well as both Veritas and IBM's volume managers

Here's what Symantec has to say about it

Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool that transforms data center operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying availability risks and lowering costs. Disaster Recovery Advisor furthers Symantec’s goal to help organizations efficiently secure and manage their information by expanding on Symantec’s  market leading high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities to identify configuration vulnerabilities in any data center and ensure applications can be recovered in the event of an unplanned outage.

Disaster Recovery Advisor has the industry’s most extensive knowledgebase of thousands of vulnerabilities and critical issues—nearly anything that may prevent a data center from recovering from an outage. This extensive knowledgebase enables customers to identify availability risks in their environment within two days of installation.  Installation of Disaster Recovery Advisor is quick and seamless, as the solution is agentless and requires zero configuration.

The knowledgebase is continuously and automatically updated, to ensure that HA/DR plans will be successful and IT organizations will be protected from the latest HA/DR issues as they are identified. For any identified risks, Disaster Recovery Advisor automates the remediation process by providing resolution guides that help fix the problem before performing much needed DR tests, saving time and other resources.

Snapshot analysis

Many IT orgaizations either fail to have complete plans for a disaster or those plans are static while the environment constantly changes. Hardware, operating system, application, application frameworks, data manageement tools and many other components of the IT infrastructure are constantly being updated. The disater planning is seldom tested because the tests are seen as being as disruptive as having an actual disaster strike.

Since the configuration changes constantly, it would be wise for an organization to either have conducted extensive testing from time to time or have a tool that will look for issues and report them allowing issues to be addressed before they become problems.

Since datacenters are like museums of computing, DR advisory tools must be able to deal with a very broad array of systems, operating systems, applications and many other layers of software. Virtual systems and physical systems must both be addressed. Mainframe, midrange and industry standard systems must also be part of the process.

While Symantec's Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor includes a very large knowledge base, it is not an exhaustive view of the datacenter. Today, it has the ability to look at things that Symantec's tools deal with. This is likely to handle the requirements of a large number of environments, but not all environments. For example, the popular MySQL database is not included in the list nor are any mainframe systems.

Symantec's representatives assured me that customers having requirements that are not addressed could work with the company's services organization to add capabilities into the knowledge base. It is not at all clear that these will ever become part of the standard product.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

Symantec, I know this is a version 1 product and more improvements and enhancement can be expected in the future. I was surprised that many types of popular open source software were not included. If an organization has deployed a Web-based solution that depends upon Apache, MySQL and some web developmenet language, your tool will only be of marginal assistance.

I'd suggest that you add support for the most popular open source database engines, application frameworks, development languages and the like.

I also noticed that many popular storage devices are not on your list. This area needs some attention as well.

Over all, however, this is an excellent first step in what is likely to end up being a journey into a very large set of hardware and software tools that are found in today's datacenters.