Business Continuity Planning: A Must To Ensure Non Disruptive Business

Business today need to be prepared and have viable business continuity plans in place, well in advance, regardless of the disaster or emergency that may arise.

Having a plan that ensures “business-as-usual scenario” in the wake of a natural or manmade disaster is a critical task for enterprises of all sizes and is pertinent to ensure customer and partner confidence. Data over the past 20 years consistently show that an extremely high percentage of companies go out of business within one year of sustaining a multi-day outage.

In today’s rapidly changing IT environments, business continuity planning constitutes a complex process and presents formidable challenges for IT managers. A proactive approach and having the right ITNW solutions in place ensures that work doesn’t comes to a standstill and employees can still communicate and carry on business processes with internal or external customers in the event of a disaster or disruption.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) helps organizations to better prepare for disruptions in business operations including natural disasters, pandemics or outbreaks and comprises of a methodology used to create a plan for how an organization will resume partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time post a disaster or disruption.

The interchangeable use of the terms “Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery” is because of the reason that some of the objectives underlined in a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan are same. However considering the spectrum of objectives covered, it can be said that the business continuity plan has a large scope.

Risk Assessment is one of the key components of disaster recovery planning. In order to create an effective plan for recovering post a catastrophe, an organization must foremost consider what potential disasters that they could feasibly encounter, and how each of these might impact their business continuity.

In a laconic sense, a business continuity plan will have two facets i.e. 

• Identification of the mission critical business functions
• Drafting of the plan, policies and the procedure to ensure the continuity of these critical functions in the event of a disaster

After the preparation of a comprehensive Business continuity plan the following activities needs to be preformed:

• Training of the employees to make them well verse with the Business continuity plan
• Performing mock drills to check the effectiveness of the drafted Business continuity plan

IT system being a business facilitator is an integral part of any business continuity plan hence to ensure non disruptive business it becomes a prerequisite to ensure high availability of the IT systems. The aim is to protect against unplanned downtime (breakdowns) and also against planned downtime (updates, upgrades, etc…), of which the consequences can sometimes be underestimated.

A wide range of technologies and approaches are available to help organizations in creating a comprehensive implementation plan in line with their BCP. With the wide spectrum of technologies available, a wise decision is required to be taken by an organization to select and deploy the best suited cost effective solution to meet their requirements.

As technologies are constantly developing, the implementation of a DR plan or a HA system solution can be very complex and costly in terms of administration of processes and resources as opposed to direct costs of implemented products (hardware, software). Therefore, technology innovation should be a simplification, consolidation and optimization service in order to reduce administration costs.

NEC offers an comprehensive integrated single-point business continuity solution  to its customer to better tackle business challenges. Based on technological leadership and innovation, NEC offers its clients a complete business continuity infrastructure (Servers, storage, Cluster, DRP, continuous availability, Management Software’s and Services) from a single-source, which can reach a 99.999% level of availability.

• Organizations looking for cost effective, comprehensive protection for business critical data and applications against hardware, software and site failures, should consider integrated HA & DR solutions such as NEC EXPRESSCLUSTER X. The solution offers disk mirroring based data protection and recovery to minimize data loss risks while offering high-availability clustering based application protection and recovery for fast and flexible application recovery.
• A single moment of downtime is not an option in today’s business environment. System administrators, therefore, focus their efforts on minimizing risk of downtime and keeping their systems up and running. Equipped with fully redundant components designed to run in lockstep, the industry standard Intel architecture-based NEC Express5800/ft series fault tolerant servers address planned and unplanned downtime and deliver exceptional availability.

The NEC FT Server System cluster with EXPRESSCLUSTER X, is ideal for mission-critical systems that require higher availability and reliability offering:

• Up-to 99.999% availability
• Affordable Fault Tolerance using industry standard Intel Xeon based technology
• No loss of transactions, no loss of data
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• Provides both Hardware level as well as Software level redundancy
• Supports any Standard/Custom built application
• Have both Local High Availability as well Disaster Recovery capabilities
• Support for Virtualization technologies
• Operational Simplicity and Easy maintenance

NEC HYDRAstor is a highly resilient distributed grid storage solution exclusively designed to address global Backup, Archive & DR requirements of business with lesser cost, complexity & risk as compared to tape solution. NEC HYDRAstor offers key benefits, as

• Unrestricted scalability,
• Self-evolving system,
• Enterprise de-duplication,
• WAN friendly DR solution,
• Non-disruptive linear scalability from Entry-level to Datacenter-class,
• Adjustable node/disk protection level beyond RAID,
• Application aware de-duplication.
• Data Protection in case of a site failure
• Data Protection in case of disk / node failure 

In conclusion, businesses today cannot afford to have systems that are not up and available, especially during peak working hours. NEC is well positioned to address the full spectrum of requirements under a business continuity plan from high availability to data protection to disaster recovery through EXPRESSCLUSTER X and FT Server, similarly HYDRAstor fulfills backup, Archive and DR requirements. The planning, design and implementation of an NEC Business Continuity solution will ensure that critical systems and data are available when needed.

All in all a combination of these offerings from NEC ensures an efficient and effective implementation of the drafted Business continuity plan.

 

Emergence of 3D Projection in Education- Adding a New Dimension

The interest in use of 3D projection in education has been increasing and while the potential of 3D technology was always understood, it fell short on its practicality and affordability.

3D imagery is now fast becoming a commonplace experience all around us. In 3D movies, in 3D TV's with dedicated 3D channels, in 3D hand-held/mobile devices, offering viewers new and exciting experiences. 

In today's digital world, children are immersed in the internet, connected through use of tablet devices, PC's, laptops and smartphones and it is of more relevance that today this interactive and digital experience is incorporated into the classroom to engage children effectively.

With use of 3D projection, it is possible to fuel creativity with use of technology innovation and provide a learning experience that is not only exciting and immersive, but is also more effective than the conventional teaching methods.

Use of 3D technology is enhancing the learning environment in classrooms and is changing the way students imbibe knowledge by increased benefits of presenting teaching content in 3D, generating significant improvement in comprehension and retention by students. 

3D projection technology dramatically improves the learning experience for students, particularly those studying geometry, anatomy, biology, astronomy or physics. Higher education institutions and technical schools get great advantage by use of 3D projection technology to show engine design, architectural 3D models, GIS and weather simulations. Such 3D modelling and viewing creates informative and captivating learning and is more efficient method of passing on spatial knowledge and visual computing data by creating more rewarding viewer experience and greater interest. It is much easier to teach such topics if the material can be visualized in 3D. This is also helpful in engaging students in the learning process.

Teaching with 3D technology is a remarkable educational tool that enables students enhance their learning capabilities wherein they can truly engage and interact with he subject criteria in a highly effective way. There are studies showing better understanding and retention, faster learning in students when taught with 3D teaching aids. 

Research has shown that 3D educational materials are more engaging and more effective. For students, the experience is more immersive, and for educators, the learning objectives are more efficiently and productively achieved.  

For decades, 3D technology and stereo-graphics has been a key feature of military, medical and geophysical imaging. With 3D projection technology becoming more affordable, it can be widely deployed in education and be beneficial in range of activities as, Architecture & Town Planning, Engineering Design, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Forensic Science, Genetics & Genomics, Oil Prospecting & Petrochemistry, Seismology & Vulcanology, Neurosurgery, Vascular Surgery etc.  

Use of 3D projection is an excellent teaching aid to make more representational models, visuals or fly-through in Design, Engineering, CAD/CAM and Simulation applications. 3D models enable the viewer to fully appreciate the final appearance of an engineered product. This is highly beneficial in Virtual Prototyping and Industrial Design.

Traditional 3D projection technology required two projectors, one for the left eye and one for the right. Both devices have to be precisely aligned through a time-consuming process and users require special filters and potentially also a special screen. These typically feature polarization methods to separate the two images at the eye and at the projector or spectral filtering methods.

For deployments in education segment, this traditional process is generally expensive and the setup being sophisticated requires expertise while installation. The new process using DLP Link technology for 3D projection from TI makes it easy to install 3D projection as this is achieved by one projector rather than traditional more expensive two projector method. Hence, no stacking of two projectors is necessary, no special screen, no special filters or signal emitter are required. The single projector produces the images for both eyes by doubling the frame rate to 120 Hz (60 Hz/eye). The impression of 3D is created by the interaction with the active LCD shutter glasses which open and shut the electronic filter in front of each eye in synchronization with the L/R eye images. This solution is cheaper and more user-friendly than the traditional two projector based 3D stereo-projection.

The availability of 3D educational content is a critical factor in rapid adoption of this technology in mainstream education. There has been a tremendous growth in the number of shipped 3D systems and devices from 20K to 8M in just 3 years and this is now driving the increased demand for 3D content. Increased 3D content availability covering wider subjects, from all aspects of K-12 to higher education is very important to further the cause and gradual improvement is seen as more and more 3D material, courseware is becoming available. 

Uniformity in 3D technology standards may be an issue, particularly with adoption of content format standards. There are many ways to achieve 3D projection and hence standards differ. Single projector system using the DLP Link protocol is gaining momentum and may become the standard in future.

Deployment of 3D technology can create a unique marketing value proposition for the school as well. A typical 3D projection setup includes the following:

• 3D Ready Projector 
• 3D Content
• 3D Glasses
• 3D Graphics card for the PC system

To make the learning process more effective and to ensure maximizing benefits from such technology advancements, it is also very important to continuously educate and share information on benefits, ease of adoption to both educators and students. A great deal of work has to be put to convince teachers on benefits of 3D technology and encourage children to learn together in groups, to have a collaborative learning process and motivate them to have their own interactive experiences.

Schools and educators also have to be responsible for the well-being of their students and need to be aware of the vision related health issues associated with prolonged 3D viewing. 

There is need to pay special attention to use of professional good quality 3D products as poorly made glasses, low quality projectors could cause fatigue and eye strain. It is also very important that the projection system is set up properly and hence, services of professional integrators should be used. Poor set up will result in non-optimal viewing and adversely effect the overall 3D experience.

It is also imperative that technology providers, consultants and integrators work more closely and collaboratively with schools to convey real benefits of use of 3D technology offerings and not just push technology into education for short-term gains.