Helper Virtual Machine for Rapid Application Recovery
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current disaster recovery solutions for IT systems face inefficiencies and high costs due to either requiring duplicate resources for symmetric configurations or taking too long to activate duplicate applications in recovery sites, which is not suitable for mission-critical applications.
Innovation Solution
A method utilizing a helper virtual machine at a recovery site to manage replicated application data, allowing for rapid activation of duplicate applications using pre-configured compute instances and releasing resources back to a common pool when not needed, thereby reducing resource allocation and recovery time.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Use of energy by moving object
If periodic backups are used for data protection, then resource usage is minimal, but recovery time can take hours or even days
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by continuously replicating data to a standby system in the background before a disaster occurs. The standby system maintains synchronized data and application states, so when activation is needed, the transition is immediate rather than requiring time-consuming restoration from periodic backups.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention creates and maintains a copy of the application and data on a standby system. This copy is kept synchronized with the production system through continuous replication, allowing the standby system to assume operations immediately upon activation without requiring full data restoration.
2Reliability
If a complete data center is duplicated at another site, then normal operations are never interrupted, but resource consumption doubles
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically adjusts resource allocation based on operational needs. During normal operation, the standby system consumes minimal resources while maintaining data synchronization. When a disaster occurs, the standby system activates and resources are dynamically reallocated to support the recovered application, avoiding the need for permanent duplicate infrastructure.
Solution Approach 2:
The standby system is designed to serve multiple purposes: it acts as a low-resource data sink during normal operation, provides immediate failover capability when needed, and can be converted into an active production system after disaster recovery. This multi-functionality eliminates the need for dedicated duplicate resources.
3Loss of time
If cloud-based solutions replicate hardware on-site for instant fail-over, then recovery time is minimized, but resource allocation increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary synchronization of data to the standby system before disaster occurs, but does not pre-provision full hardware resources. The standby system maintains only the essential data and configuration, with compute resources allocated on-demand during activation, avoiding permanent resource dedication.
Data Source
AI summary
In a first virtual storage device managed by a helper virtual machine, first data of a first application is stored, the first application executing on a first system, the helper virtual machine executing on a recovery system. Responsive to determining that a duplicate of the first application should be activated on the recovery system, a compute instance is spawned in a hypervisor executing on the recovery system. In the compute instance, a duplicate of the first application is provisioned. The first data is reassociated from the helper virtual machine to the provisioned duplicate application. The duplicate application is activated, the activating causing the duplicate application to execute on the second system using the first data.