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Disaster Recovery
We currently run our own data center in-house but have concerns with disaster recovery. Do we need to purchase additional servers to provide backup for our current solution, or is there a solution out there that is strictly for data backup and disaster recovery?
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2 Answers
Risk management of your points of failure is how we manage this. We have a lot of servers in house. The vulnerable places for them is power, network access, disk drives and overall server life.
For the power outages, we can do nothing except manage surges and ensure clean restarts. For network access we have multiple pipes through different providers. For hard drives, we have a strict policy of replacing server drives every year without fail, otherwise you are just sitting around waiting for a disk to crash. Where possible store data on raid-5 arrays, and use programs like rsync to ensure that redudant copies of critical information are present on the network in a managed fashion. Keep spare servers of the same motherboard type as your primary server so they can drop in replacement in the unlikely event of a motherboard / cpu failing. We do all that and have no tape or disk back up units.
Hi Sarah. Looking at adding more technology is always a business technology juggling event. Sometimes a real head scratcher. I am not a 'hands on or in the pit IT expert but have significant experience in business contingency planning. Here are some suggestions for you and your team:
A. Answer the following question(s):
1. How does your company make money on a daily basis?
2. Who are your key customers to create this money stream? Historically 80% of your company's revenue come from 20% of your customers.
3. Make a list of all IT systems and applications that directly support your key revenue stream. From a data backup perspective you now have your key list.
B. Classify all servers and applications that support absolutely vital/critical business functions and processes aligned with your "20%" revenue stream. Your classification scale should go from "must have right now" to "it can wait for 30 days and beyond".
C. Your server/application classification list will identify where you should be spending your money and on what technology (the types of technology that Karl Geppert mentioned). This is key to fiscal responsiveness and effective data recovery.
D. Develop a data backup and recovery budget from your answers in line item C above. Leverage your vendor community. Provide this to the decision makers.
Think of data recovery, data backup and data management as split between revenue support/generation and "all other". Then go after the vendor community to help you with identifying which technology best fits your needs. It's more short-term work up front but will save you considerable dollars on the back end.
Hope this helps.
All the best,
James.
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