Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery is an often overlooked part of many organisations IT plans. It is however one of the most important factors in rebuilding an organisations data & ability to operate from a disaster situation; such as a fire, theft or a simple hardware failure. 

With a disaster recovery strategy in place, should a ‘worst case scenario’ occur, the procedures and associated tools will already be in place to get the system back up and running in a predefined time period. Common expectations are for a 4-hour or an 8-hour recovery window. Without forward planning it could take at minimum 15-30 hours to rebuild a downed server.

There are many methods of implementing system imaging technology. The simplest version is an off-line image. Once the server is working in a satisfactory state, we take the server offline. While the server is shutdown, we take a complete copy of the working system and store it on another hard drive.

Once the image is complete the backup drive is removed from the working system. The whole procedure should take under an hour and will enable us to save 15+ hours work in the event of a system corruption. The cost to the client is minimal, the hardware is one additional hard drive. The downside of off-line imaging is that it is a manual process and the image needs to be regularly updated manually, which involves taking the server off-line. Ideally the image should be updated every 3 to 6 months, or anytime significant changes are made to the configuration.

As a further benefit, the drive also becomes a hot-spare. Should one of the live drives fail, we have a spare on hand to replace it with.

What would it cost your company if your servers where down for an extended period?

What will happen to your business if your server gets stolen/damaged or has a major hardware failure?

Checklist:

• must have raid on server and centralise all data

• minimum daily tape/disk backup and keep offsite

• Have a spare disaster recovery server

• create images of all your servers and keep them up to date

• consider secondary backup onto NAS or other disk storage

• consider a hosted backup solution

• service agreements on your server hardware

• routine maintenance on your network equipment

• prepare a disaster recovery plan

Benefits:

Business & Data security, reduced down-time, insurance on major disasters and peace of mind 

Disaster Recovery Planning

With the level of dependence many organisations place on their information systems, it is necessary to consider the business consequences of a potential system failure. For example what is the financial cost to your organisation for a single day of lost productivity due to an unexpected system failure? – Disaster Recovery Implementation The sinle most effective tool in ‘disaster recovery’ is having an image of the working system volume of your server. Should a critical failure occur, rather than re-build the server from scratch we can restore a known working image. 

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