Why Businesses Need Data Center Services

- Pooja Chopra, spokesperson for Spectranet (www.spectranet.in), says:

It has been reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that the majority of SMEs never recover from catastrophic data loss.

In a recent research International Data Center reported that 58 percent of the companies are doing just a local back-up.

Local backups are good and beneficial considering the first step of protection they provide. These are very effective against initial errors such as manual intervention with data, software or hardware failures but these fail when it comes to protection against theft, disaster or multiple software/hardware failure due to voltage.

Seeing the day-to-day growing dependence, it may not be exaggerating that businesses thrive on data and Internet. Yet, it is surprising to see that how businesses are taking risks without thinking much to invest in a data protection plan. Enterprises need to understand that unlike physical assets such as buildings and equipments which can be resurrected quickly through insurance, data loss is practically incurable. It is the most determining factor for the existence of a business. Hence, the need of the hour is to think about enterprise data security plan.

Data security plan, in order to be completely fortified, should meet the three ‘C’s of safe and reliable data center:

Comprehensive: The data plan for enterprises should be universal and unique to fight the threats and challenges ahead. One data plan should be able to work against all the odds such as manual errors, application failures, natural and man-made disasters such as fire, theft, floods etc.

Convenience: It should be plug-n-play for your business and IT department. The maintenance of the servers and security of data should be the worry of data center services providers and not yours. Without changing much into your existing IT architecture, they should be able to provide you the necessary or expanded bandwidth whenever necessary without nudging you for constant care.

Costs: This is the most crucial part. The data center services should fit into your budget. Your vendor should not be increasing the amount of the package or bandwidth costs on monthly basis. The SLA and contract should be with a focus on your business and computing needs.

So, to overcome the challenge of data protection, data center backups are the best method to retain your data and ensure its well being. The data center services providers are offering increasing bandwidth and ubiquity at any location. The data center is remotely monitored. Human involvement is limited to IT engineers and expert maintenance team. The geographical location of data centers also minimizes the risk of earthquake, floods and other natural calamities. They are often situated at low risk zones.

Most of companies and enterprises are opting for the data center solutions after imbibing the role of data in the growth of their ventures. India clearly emerges as the winner seeing the advancements in technology and cost effective trends in data center realms. Providers like Spectranet offer tier- 3 infrastructure set up to equip the companies against any data threat. In the times of disasters, data center India provides quick recovery progress and help business continuity by retrieving the data in the shortest turnaround time.

Disaster Recovery for Remote Sites and the Data Center

Q&A with Casey Burns, product marketing manager of virtual solutions with Quantum (www.quantum.com):

DCP: Why is DXi V1000 useful in today's enterprise data centers? Why should data center and IT managers care about it? How can they benefit from it?

Burns: The DXi V1000 is useful for any sized organization that is lacking a disaster recovery solution at their main location or at their remote locations.  Enterprise class data center managers can appreciate the DXi V1000’s flexible deployment model. The DXi V1000  is a virtual appliance that works with an existing VMware environment, retaining all of the features and functionality that customers have come to expect from DXi-Series hardware appliances.  If a customer has a number of remote sites where they are currently utilizing an aging tape drive or maybe some old disk array with insufficient capacity or functionality, the DXi V1000 would be a great solution.  Customers clearly recognize the value of deduplication. With normal deduplication rates a single virtual instance of the DXi V1000 can store upwards of 40TB, providing very long retention periods and fast local restores of the data.  All DXi’s have replication capabilities, so it’s possible to replicate the data from a DXi V1000 at a remote location to a physical DXi, or another instance of the DXi V1000 at the data center.   This turns out to be a very viable  disaster recovery solution, which can be an overlooked value of deduplication. 

DCP: Where should DXi V1000 rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Burns: For those customers seeking disaster recovery for their remote sites or data center, the DXi V1000 could easily rank in the top 5.  The inherent value of utilizing the existing investment in infrastructure (servers, networking, WAN connections, backup applications, etc) to deploy a virtual appliance deduplication solution allows customers to make very quick, yet smart, decisions on using the DXi V1000.  At $2250 per TB with built in replication, encryption and deduplication in a small (4GB vRAM) virtual appliance, this can be a very compelling story for data center managers, allowing them to move disaster recovery of their remote sites and data center up the priority list.  Customers already have virtual environments deployed. Why not use those resources to establish a disaster recovery solution? 

For data center customers who are also in an acquisition mode, the DXi V1000 could be a great fit as well.  Perhaps a company has a data center with a physical DXi appliance that has high-capacity scale, like the DXi8500 with up to 320TB.  Imagine that company acquires a smaller company that isn’t tied into their IT infrastructure yet. That company could easily deploy a DXi V1000 at the new location and start replication immediately to the DXi8500 in the data center and bring that site into the parent company’s policies and procedures quickly and easily.

DCP: What are the biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to DXi V1000?

Burns: IT managers should keep in mind that performance for DXi V1000 is largely determined by the virtual environment it is deployed in.  We have seen really good performance from our own testing and from our own customers, around 1TB/hr ingest (we still use the same inline variable length deduplication process as our physical appliances), and we have best practice guides available to help tune virtual environments for optimal performance.  This is not so much a characteristic of the solution itself, but rather a challenge of being a virtual appliance and being bound to external factors that are somewhat driven by physical appliances.  The features and functionality are the primary selling factors for DXi V1000. 

DCP: How can data center and IT managers overcome those challenges?

Burns: As I mentioned, there are not many challenges, really the performance which is negated by the value and uniqueness of the DXi V1000, and we can address this challenge with the best practice guide available from Quantum to help tune the solution and optimize performance in a virtual environment.

DCP: What advice can you give to IT and data center managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from?

Burns: Customers should be looking into solutions that can provide them with scale and deployment options for their data center, remote offices and any other offices they may consume, and also how can the partner help them protect data today and tomorrow, use of the cloud and protect both physical and virtual data sets in a single solution. Quantum has been advancing deduplication for over six years now. We provide customers with options for physical appliances and now offer a virtual appliance in DXi V1000. The DXi Series can protect both physical and virtual data sets, and provides a cloud connected architecture, whether that be private, public or a hybrid cloud approach.  There are a number of deduplication options for customers to choose from, but only Quantum holds the patent for variable length deduplication, proven to be the most disk efficient process available.  DXi offers an unmatched breadth of scalability, going from 1TB to 320TB in a single software platform. 

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Casey Burns is Quantum’s Product Marketing Manager, Virtual Solutions.  Casey has extensive experience and knowledge in the storage industry, and a professional focus in the areas of data deduplication and virtualization. 

How The Cloud is Changing Disaster Recovery

- Jackie Yuen, senior product manager, ITO Business, New Business Division, NTT Com Asia (www.ntt.com.hk), says:

In the wake of the recent natural disasters that have occurred in Asia and around the world, CIOs are scrambling to ensure that their companies are prepared when disaster strikes. Most companies agree that a sudden unexpected outage can wreak major damage in terms of compromised data or lost business, yet many do not have in place adequate disaster recovery (DR) plans, equipment and infrastructure to support a rapid and effective response

In addition, DR has traditionally been expensive and complex – comprising entire duplicate IT infrastructure at two or more different sites, in addition to all the hands-on systems and storage management that accompanies it. The extensive resources and implementation time needed has discouraged many enterprises from investing in DR planning and processes.

With the recent emergence of virtualization and cloud technologies, DR is now available through the cloud and it is transforming the way businesses carry out continuity planning and deployment. Many enterprises highly value the unparalleled agility, scalability and cost-effectiveness brought by NTT Com Asia EnterpriseCloud’s “pay-as-you-go” model and “elastic scaling” features, but still consider that security, reliability and service quality are top factors.

Efficiency, Deployment and Recovery Time:

• Traditional DR solution may involve hardware procurement and installation which may take months to implement. Deployment of cloud-based DR solution can be completed within days.
• In the event of disaster, the recovery time is shortened to mere minutes to turn on the “standby” resources which would otherwise take hours or days in the case of traditional DR, thus meeting faster Recovery Time Objectives.

Agility:

• Traditional DR solutions require enterprises to duplicate data or even the entire IT infrastructure in two more remote physical data centres.
• With cloud-based DR, enterprises can operate a secondary DR site in the cloud using on demand compute resources to meet varying conditions and emergency levels.

Cost-effectiveness and Pricing Model:

• Conventional DR would involve duplication of hardware, software and hosting that would cost up to 100% of the cost of primary site.
• With the “pay-as-you-go” pricing model of cloud-based DR solution, enterprises can pay only for the compute resources when used, which makes it very cost-effective to maintain and bring as much as 60% cost savings as compared to conventional DR.
• For instance, the CAPEX investment of conventional DR could cost a million dollars and the deployment typically ranges from tens to hundreds of thousand dollars per month whereas cloud-based DR solutions generally cost a fraction of that, at several thousand to tens of thousand dollars.

IT Complexity:

• Small enterprises without the resources to maintain a physical backup site can now have that option of using a fraction of the traditional DR costs with no upfront investment. These additional compute resources are activated on-demand and only storage that hold the data will be charged on normal basis which significantly cuts down their stand-by costs.

The advantages of using cloud DR services for large enterprises who already operate their own primary and second backup sites are not only on the time and resources being reduced, but the cost savings and operational efficiency gained by moving some or all of their DR infrastructure into the cloud. Through the online management portal, the additional compute resources can be provisioned, offering simplified management all via one interface.

As the technologies of enterprise-grade cloud hosting solutions have advanced significantly over the last few years, enterprises customers’ needs on security, stability and network performance have never been more stringent. Based on our observations, when enterprises consider cloud hosting solutions, they are looking for unparalleled benefits from the “best of both worlds” – cost effective public cloud, highly secured private cloud to customized hybrid cloud services. Gradually, enterprise customers are turning to trusted global telcos that are committed to optimising their cloud hosting solutions for a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective cloud-based enterprise solution, providing end-to-end SLAs which leverage their global network connectivity, world-class data centres and business resumption centre.

Four Ways to Back Up Your Data Offsite

- Gary Sevounts, vice president of marketing Zetta (www.zetta.net), says:

As data growth is still one of the top three challenges for organizations today, keeping the data available becomes more and more challenging, whether a user accidentally deletes a file or a hurricane takes out the entire data center. Companies such as Google have largely licked this problem. With interconnected data centers worldwide, it can afford to shut one completely down without losing data or lowering service levels. But what about those who don’t have the billions to spend on building redundant data centers? To address their offsite data backup needs, there are four major options: tape, mirroring to a DR site, colocation and online data backups.

Tape
Tape backups have been around for decades. Many companies already have the equipment, software and procedures in place for tape archiving. In those organizations where tape is working well and is not tying up IT resources, it is probably best to continue its usage. But for many, tape has drawbacks such as:

• High cost of hardware, backup software and tape cartridges
• The need to physically transport tapes off site
• Slow data retrieval and restores. Both full and incremental backup tapes need to be obtained from the storage facility and loaded in the proper sequence, before a file can be restored
• High failure rate of restores

Mirroring or Replicating to a Secondary Site
Even if a company doesn’t have multiple data centers, it can often set up servers at another of its offices to act as a backup for the primary storage system. Since the data is transferred electronically between the primary and the secondary storage disks, and since the backup copy is online rather than sitting on a tape in a vault, restoring data is much faster than when using tape backups. The secondary site can also be used to ensure business continuity during a disaster. However, this approach also means:

• Purchasing an additional set of hardware and software
• Installing the required power, cooling and networking at the secondary site
• Ongoing costs for licensing and support
• Having staff to support the secondary equipment

Backup to a Colocation Facility
Companies can lease rack space at a colocation facility and install their own backup equipment. This saves some of the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. However, it still requires:

• Purchase of additional hardware and software
• Ongoing costs for licensing and support
• Costs of leasing space at the colocation facility and any additional fees for support.

Online Data Backups
With online data backups, a company pays a fee for the amount of offsite storage required. The data is automatically backed up and files can be restored over a WAN connection. Advantages include:

• Instant retrieval and restoration of data to the same location or to a disaster recovery site
• Reduced complexity – no need to buy or maintain hardware or software
• Reduced backup windows
• Scalable on demand as storage needs grow
• No need to have staff trained in specialized skills for backup and retrieval

5 Life Preservers for SMB IT Disasters

- Eric Webster,chief revenue officer of Doyenz (http://www.doyenz.com/), says:

Disasters come in all shapes, sizes and material. In major natural disasters, there can be loss of property and belongings, a sense of disconnect from the world and for some, a long recovery time. In the IT world, when a disaster strikes it can cause the same effects, interrupting a business’ ability to function, lose information, disconnect the network and can cause hours to days of downtime while trying to reboot and recover all of the information.

Unlike natural disasters, issues like hardware failures, faulty software upgrades and man-made errors are usually the culprit for IT disasters. No matter what the reason is for the disaster, every business, no matter the size should have a plan to avoid the most unimaginable to happen, losing revenue due to downtime or even shutting down.

By keeping in mind these 5 “disaster life preservers” SMBs can ease their minds knowing their business will be prepared for any failure or error thrown their way.

Data encryption is vital to the mobile workforce and is quickly evolving in every industry. The need for employees to work remotely in times of disaster should require everyone to use a secure connection when accessing the corporate network. Demanding a service provider to use the U.S. government standard AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-256 encryption ensures that the business’ data is secure and stays uncompromised.

To many, having your businesses data backed-up seems like a perfect solution. For those wanting to ensure their business is disaster proof, the strategy of redundancy and geographic distribution is critical. Maintaining multiple copies of your files and distributing those copies in data centers that are at least 250 miles apart guarantees that if one data center goes offline then you will still be able to access the backup and even a secondary backup.

The next step is having all of your secure and backed-up data available to your employees. One method becoming more common is cloud computing. With a cloud-based disaster recovery service, the entire production environment can be in the cloud at any time. The ability to do this allows for employees to access all of the critical data needed including Excel, Quicken and Quickbooks from any location.

How do you know this works? Regular tests should be required to ensure that all equipment is running correctly. By poking holes and testing the plan at least once a quarter, you will be able to know that if something were to happen that everything is doing what it is supposed to.

Finally, the ability to ensure that your company can get back to business with as minimal of downtime as possible should be something that all business owners pay attention to. This is one step that many SMB owners often lack at adding to their plan. To minimize the downtime in the case of a disaster, you should always ask if your cloud-based disaster recovery service will allow you to create replicas of the production environment in a secure virtual lab. This allows for testing of software upgrades or tedious, error-prone migrations before integrating them into the work environment.

By implementing a waterproof disaster recovery plan like this into your business, you are not only implementing a plan, but you are also incorporating a disaster prevention mechanism into your business’ every day function.

About the author: Eric Webster has 15+ years of experience in the area of high availability and business continuity. He has served in management and executive roles at Oracle, Ricoh, NetBrowser and XOsoft which was acquired by CA for its IP-based replication solutions that help customers migrate data from physical to virtual machines in the event of an outage. He currently serves as chief revenue officer of Doyenz, a provider of cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.

Protecting Against Every Potential Failure Mode For Your Business Critical Applications

- Paddy Falls, chief technology officer at Neverfail (http://www.neverfailgroup.com/), says:

User connectivity is imperative in today’s enterprises and IT managers need to ensure that employees remain productive in the event of a system failure, otherwise the organisation suffers financially and industry reputation can be compromised if customer demands cannot be met. Infrastructure resilience is not only useful; it is needed to reassure customers, shareholders and partners that the business can remain afloat with a view to guaranteeing a certain level of service to sustain the current customer base and attract prospective clients. With a robust business continuity solution in place, organisations can maintain their business and reputation even in the event of unforeseen disasters.

Both Forrester and Gartner have reported that business continuity is one of the top business drivers for mid-market customers. This has also been reflected in recent high profile cloud outages which have illustrated the detrimental effects of downtime on the balance sheet. Therefore a continuous availability solution designed to protect the fundamental workings of the datacentre ensures critical business processes and operations can remain functional. If a problem occurs, the solution can take automated action and failover components within the ecosystem to a disaster recovery site and users are able to continue working without interruption.

In advance of deploying business continuity and disaster recovery software from vendors like Neverfail, datacentre managers will need to determine which of the organisation’s applications will benefit most from continuous availability support. In doing this they will ensure they get the maximum return from their investment. Prioritising applications, such as email and key business applications, showcases continuity cold spots that could cause large re-percussions during downtime scenarios.

In addition, when IT administrators are deploying Neverfail they will need to ensure that the hardware, application software and infrastructure can fully support continuous availability solutions.

To determine which applications will receive maximum returns from Neverfail technology, datacentre managers must estimate the likely cost to the business caused by data loss or downtime for their most critical applications. Typically they will gather this data by asking business owners to estimate the cost to the business incurred from downtime and data loss separately for periods of 4 hours, 1 hour and 15 minutes. This will allow managers to define minimum downtime requirements as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and minimum loss of data requirements, as a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for each application. Managers can then determine the priority for implementing Neverfail by choosing those applications that do not support the required RTO or RPO calculated, and ranking these in terms of costs to the business if objectives are not met.

Before deploying Neverfail for a specific application, an IT administrator runs a Neverfail tool called SCOPE on each of the servers where they plan to deploy Neverfail. SCOPE will typically gather data for a one day period. A SCOPE report can then recommend changes to the customer’s environment to ensure it will meet the required RPO and RTO times. Examples of suggested changes are upgrading applications to their latest service packs, or verifying that the standby servers being used to protect the primary servers have sufficient disk storage.

IT managers should look for a single solution that protects against every potential failure mode for all their business critical applications. Specifically, IT managers need to avoid trying to deploy multiple availability solutions for different components. They may, for example, consider choosing a range of availability solutions to protect specific applications, virtual machines running on a single hypervisor, physical machines, or different types of storage device. The cost of deploying and managing various availability solutions will typically be high, and the resulting complexity can itself result in the applications being at more at risk of becoming unavailable.

Neverfail technology provides a single continuous availability solution supporting both high availability and disaster recovery for any Windows application across heterogeneous environments and runs independently of the type of storage used. This also means that when the IT infrastructure evolves with new versions of applications being introduced, as well as migrations to VMs and initiating new storage add-ons, the same Neverfail solution will continue to provide protection to eliminate any single point of failure.

Simplfying Disaster Recovery

- Michael Denapoli, solutions architect at Vision Solutions (www.visionsolutions.com), says:

DR (disaster recovery) planning itself is the biggest challenge. Deciding where to fail over, how fast systems must be brought online to avoid business impact and what infrastructure will be bought/leased/borrowed to provide the DR platform is a large-scale project that will require the assistance of multiple persons and departments. Double-Take Availability can help simplify many components of DR, but a full DR plan is a much bigger project than simply deciding what technology to use to provide a failover and recovery method.

The best way to overcome these challenges is to build DR into the equation right from the start. As soon as the software and hardware is decided on, it’s time to start thinking about how to protect it. By making DR part of implementation planning, you eliminate the need to try to retrofit a DR solution into an already complex application that’s further complicated because it is already configured and running in production.

Look for solutions that are not limited to one hardware, virtualization and/or software platform. Pick tools that can be used both on different systems and in different ways. Not every system’s DR will look or act the same, and they should therefore not be treated the same. You need a tool-kit, not a single wizard.

Also, take the time to really dig into the requirements for a given system. Every line-of-business manager wants zero downtime, but 98% of them will not want it anymore when they see what that level of Recovery Time Objective actually costs. When presented with the numbers, most will agree to more reasonable requirements, giving you more flexibility.

Double-Take Availability allows enterprise datacenters to gain a remarkable amount of flexibility in how, when and where they will perform High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Using only native tools will leave gaps in HA and DR plans, while also forcing staff to learn dozens of different tools they have to monitor and manage.

Double-Take Availability provides a coordinated set of tools across Windows, Linux and AIX, limiting the number of technologies staff isrequired to learn, and also reducing the number of vendors that need to be contacted if the unexpected happens.

The Double-Take Availability solution set should rank just behind deciding which technologies are going to be used in production. Once the combination of physical and virtual hardware is decided; and the selection of software products to be installed is finalized, the time to decide how to provide HA and DT has come.

In some cases, HA and DR are part of a company-wide, coordinated effort; which will define timing. Otherwise, as soon as a production server moves from selection to implementation, it’s time to talk about DR.

Reducing the Data Loss Exposure During Deduplication

- Liat Malki, director of marketing Axxana (http://www.axxana.com/), says:

In order to ensure business continuity and the ability to recover operations in a disaster, it is critical to have two copies of your company’s data located a good distance apart. Getting the data to the recovery site can be a challenge, however. Sending tape backups by truck or plane is relatively inexpensive, but not very timely, and it doesn’t protect the most recent updates. Transmitting data over networks is not very affordable, but it is more timely. Unless the location of the secondary data center is very close, some data will still be lost, because you won’t be able to use synchronous replication.

Companies are increasingly using data deduplication to reduce the communication line costs when replicating data between primary and secondary data centers. Depending upon the deduplication technology and the type of data, deduplication ratios can range from 2:1 to 20:1 and higher. A 2:1 deduplication ratio reduces storage requirements, and thus communication expenses, by 50%, a 10:1 ratio delivers a 90% reduction, and a 20:1 ratio delivers a 95% reduction.

While you will often hear organizations discussing the savings in physical storage, the real savings when replicating deduplicated data for disaster recovery comes from the reduction in communication line charges. Rates vary by country, region, city and even neighborhoods, but regardless of location, wide area network line charges remain one of the greatest impediments to comprehensive data replication and disaster recovery plans. And even if affordable, in some locations, particularly rural areas and newly developing regions, access to high-quality data lines may be very limited or non-existent, and the only option may be low-quality, low-speed communication links. In these instances, data deduplication can be critically important.

For data consistency reasons, most deduplication technologies operate on an application-consistent point-in-time copy of the data. The process looks like this:

1. Take an application-consistent point-in-time copy of the data
2. Deduplicate the data
3. Transmit the deduplicated data to the remote site.

Until the data has been safely stored at the remote site, however, there is a risk of data loss. Regardless of the technology and the deduplication ratio, the process of data deduplication takes time. As data centers are not stagnant, new data is being created all the time. The longer the deduplication process takes, the greater the exposure and risk of losing newly created data.

Axxana has developed technology to maintain a mirrored copy of the most recent data updates in a disaster-proof storage system at the primary data center. In doing so, companies can take full advantage of the latest in data-deduplication technology, reducing storage and bandwidth costs, without increasing the risk of data loss during the deduplication and transmission process. Data that has not yet been transmitted to the remote site is safely stored in our black box. From the time the first asynchronous replication is committed at the second data center, our fire-proof, heat resistant, water proof storage system protects all the data generated between then and the next asynchronous update. Because the amount of changed data between snapshots is relatively small, we can store all of the changed data on rugged solid-state disk drives that are more tolerant of extremes in environmental conditions. If a disaster occurs, our system automatically transmits the data to the remote data center or can be physically retrieved and transmitted over an IP network. By combining Axxana and data deduplication technology, companies can achieve the most complete and most affordable data protection possible. You can learn more about the ROI of Axxana’s approach to data replication, by reading “ROI Model: The Cost of Communication Bandwidth for Remote Replication.”

Getting Users Access (Quickly) After A Disaster Recovery

- Mark Buchanan, director of information security at Savvis (www.savvis.com), says:

Managing access rights in a disaster recovery situation.
Ensure that the common disasters are planned and tested. Ensure systems are redundant from a data center perspective, capacity is appropriate for HVAC, power, staffing and telecommunications are redundant. From a system level, ensure that a plan is in place to bring up the most critical systems first. The system plan needs to be documented and updated and the team supporting those systems needs to review them on a regular basis. From a user perspective, communications to the users about how to access key systems needs to be decided on with communications plans for who will instruct the users about any changes to processes or system usage. The more of these items that can be automated, the better. It is important, however, to ensure that testing of the automation is on the list of items to test during exercising the disaster recovery plans.

Draft a plan.
Remember that having a plan is better than not having a plan. Exercise the plan. Gather executives or key people together and talk through exactly what the disaster involves and have them talk through the incident and ensure that there is consensus on how well each of the elements could perform. When exercising, rely on the documentation over the people in the room. While we hope no individual is harmed during a disaster, this isn’t a realistic situation if it’s not written down. During the exercise, you need someone to transcribe the events. This provides a list of the gaps that will need to be addressed and provide lessons learned which can be used for the next exercise.

Before Getting Started
You have to know what’s important to your business. Business Impact Assessments (BIAs) need to be performed with Risk Assessments (RAs) providing the information to help plan the way forward with the building and implementing of a sustainable disaster recovery plan. Once the BIAs and RAs are completed, you need to identify whether your gaps are technological, procedural, personnel or some other gap. A priority on fixing those gaps needs to be assessed and then driven forward within the organization.

There is a need for a documentation repository to store the plans in a central location that can be tracked and updated on a regular basis. While it is common desire for each team to maintain their specific plans, should a disaster occur and affect that team, there is a possibility that business knowledge could be lost or need to be recreated. The disaster recovery program will need to be endorsed within the company to ensure the employees understand the level of importance.

Costs involved.
While there are numerous tools that can be used to assist in managing disaster recovery within a company, investing in the human capital to do the analysis can be the largest draw. This can be done with the assistance of consultants who understand the right questions to ask to ensure that a quality analysis is performed and that the gaps are documented for remediation. As an example, and going to the far end of the spectrum, if paper clips are, for some reason, integral to the operation of your business, and paper clips were unavailable, what is your fallback plan? This is the same that goes with your employees’ computers, financial systems, database systems and onto the kiosks, phones or other mechanisms used to communicate with your customers along with the facilities that your employees utilize. What the analysis needs and should show is that critical items needed to perform some identified level of business and include the plans that employees can use should a disaster disable systems, facilities or, unfortunately, people’s ability to assist with certain processes.

The benefit will be a clear picture of the critical areas within the business and a plan on how to overcome them, should the worst-case scenario occur to a business. The pitfalls can be over-thinking the analysis and trying to solve for every disaster. If you keep the core portions of your business in sight and use general disaster concepts - such as loss of facility, loss of functionality or loss of personnel - you can get yourself off to a good start. Practicing the disaster recovery items will help to identify new gaps and will keep the plans fresh in the minds of your team members.

Managing Access After a Disaster

- Bob Roudebush, vice president of marketing at Neverfail (www.neverfailgroup.com), says:

Most issues that occur during a disaster result from the IT organization not understanding the applications that depend on access rights and where they are stored. When it is stored externally to the application, many organizations fail to adequately ensure directory services and access rights management is available at the disaster recovery site. When it is stored and managed as part of the application, many times that information is not protected at all. A great example of the latter is any application that depends on Microsoft SQL Server databases. One common approach to SQL protection is to use built-in features such as log shipping or database mirroring. What many IT administrators fail to understand is that these features only protect user databases, not the system databases SQL uses to store things such as database roles and system jobs for access rights management.

The best way to be prepared is to have a complete understanding of the applications that are critical to the organization and what interdependencies those applications might have. This includes, of course, access rights. If applications depend on external directories for access rights, ensure you have a strategy in-place to protect those directory services. If applications have built-in directory services and access rights management, ensure that the protection strategy you use for them is comprehensive and protects not just the data but application-level configuration information such as access rights.

There are a variety of other everyday causes, such as computer or server malfunctions, power outages, and more, that can lead to organization unplanned downtime. Be sure those who need access or who will need to respond when disaster strikes can do so – lack of preparedness will impede the ability to respond as well as impact the brand, and more than likely have financial repercussions.

Costs can vary based on the approach involved. At one end of the spectrum are backup solutions which typically are the cheapest to deploy but provide the worst protection because they only backup data periodically anddon’t provide any automated monitoring and recovery capabilities, reducing both the organization’s RPO and RTO. At the high-end of the cost scale are expensive disk-based and fault tolerant hardware solutions which provide improved RPO and RTO but typically can cost tens orhundreds of thousands of dollars. Many application-specific protection technologies or 3rd party niche solutions can provide good protection at a more affordable cost in many cases.

There are a variety of other everyday causes, such as computer or server malfunctions, power outages, and more, that can lead to organization unplanned downtime. Be sure those who need access or who will need to respond when disaster strikes can do so – lack of preparedness will impede the ability to respond as well as impact the brand, and more than likely have financial repercussions.

Maxava: Innovative, High-Availability and Disaster Recovery

- Data Center Post spoke with Simon O’Sullivan, vice president at Maxava (http://www.maxava.com/), a worldwide provider of innovative high availability and disaster recovery software solutions for IBM i systems. Customers have been using Maxava HA software for more than a decade to ensure business continuity, reduce risk and meet regulatory requirements. Maxava’s software ensures business resilience for a cross section of the world’s most demanding IBM i customers through SaaS, cloud, subscription and traditional licensed software models. Maxava has staff and customers located worldwide.

Why are Maxava’s HA and DR solutions useful in today's enterprise data centers?
The data center model is constantly evolving. A few years ago it was good enough to take daily tape backups of your critical information and send them into offsite storage. Often the off-site storage was at a data center and the service included a “cold backup.” This meant that in the event of a disaster on your primary server – the data center would provide a backup server and restore your latest tape saves – and effectively rebuild your environment from scratch.

The obvious problem with this model was twofold – first, it often took several days to get the customer’s environment re-built on the cold backup server. And second, what about the data that was updated in the time between the last backup and the disaster? – That data was effectively lost and would need to be re-keyed manually, adding to the total outage that the users would suffer. In addition to this, the amount of data that the average company retained was growing out of hand to even the smallest organization. Businesses could no longer endure an outage of multiple days – especially an Internet-driven business where customers would just "click" away to a different supplier if a site wasn’t available. This still is a critical problem for many businesses.

To counter this problem, many companies with critical data requirements - such as banks, finance companies, healthcare, and manufacturing - turned to the “do it yourself” (DIY) model. In this model, they purchased a second server and data replication software to implement a "hot backup" solution. In case of a disaster, they could “swap” from one server to the other without data loss or any significant downtime. Sometimes, this second server would be placed in a data center which adding an extra level of security to their disaster recovery planning. The data center delivered earthquake, fire, hurricane and tornado protection along with UPS and generator power to counter any power loss problems.


Now DR in the cloud is another option. Sometimes the customer does not want to purchase a duplicate server, purchase the replication software, implement the project and then train their staff to monitor and manage the replicating environment on a daily basis. They would prefer the data centre to provide all this as a service. Data replication technologies have improved enormously over the past few years to allow easy implementation and advanced monitoring and management, so for most data centers this is not a problem.


Disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud is the latest model to evolve in today’s enterprise data centers. The customer can now replicate their data directly into the data center where it is stored on a hot backup (often a virtualized server to cut costs). One server may act as a backup for many companies while all their various databases are held in secure discrete partitions on a single machine. The replication environment is often monitored and managed by the data center staff and the customer just pays a monthly fee. The customer is basically renting the replication software and the data center is providing the hot backup service, the backup server and the data center services in one easy package. This can be quite cost-effective when the data center is providing the service to many customers. Regular testing is provided with the service, and, in the event of a disaster, the customer can often re-locate and run their business from the data center workspace.


Maxava is an IBM i data replication engine which will replicate data updates as they happen in real-time to a backup server across any distance.


How can data center/IT managers benefit from this solution?
Data center managers must evolve to meet the new model of DR in the cloud. The data center can become the full DR solution provider once they partner with a provider of data replication technology for the various servers they support. They can go from providing a cold backup to providing a full hot backup and associated services.


What advice would you give to data center/IT managers about your solution/technology that would help them make a purchase decision for this type of solution?


The IT manager can take advantage of DR in the cloud easily by paying a monthly fee for a full service. They no longer need to purchase a new machine and replication software or train their staff. They can have a hot backup available and can avoid downtime and data loss. The data center manager can change from being a cold backup solution provider to that of a hot backup solution provider.


If you think your organization will never need DR technology, you’re wrong. My office is about 300 miles away from Christchurch in New Zealand which was hit by a devastating earthquake weeks before the huge earthquake and tsunami struck Northern Japan, not to mention the crisis over the crippled nuclear reactors there.


We have about six customers in the Christchurch downtown business center which was cordoned-off immediately after the earthquake. Many businesses had to evacuate and leave behind their servers and backup tapes, and many of these businesses were offline a week after the earthquake. IT staff were unable to retrieve their computer records and data.


There was a TV news segment that showed a man walking down a debris filled street carrying a computer server under each arm. This isn’t a DR plan. The truth is many businesses will fail in the coming months because they did not prepare for a disaster like this. Without adequate backup, these businesses have lost access to their servers and their data. Even if IT staff can find their records and computers in the debris, it’s impossible to tell if they can recover any hardware or data of value. Without an effective disaster recovery plan and the technology enabled to execute on the plan, business data centers affected by the earthquake – or any other natural disaster -- are crippled until they can get to their data and rebuild.

Tape Backup: An Insurance You Cannot NOT Afford

- Peri Grover, Director of Product Marketing for Overland Storage (www.overlandstorage.com), says:

Tape is like insurance. You’re tempted to save a few bucks by doing without it, but the cost of not having it when you need it can be catastrophic. Without a tape backup solution, or with the wrong tape backup solution, a company can lose access to data and either fire their IT manager, face severe regulatory fines for not being able to reproduce data, or flat out go out-of-business. Tape is rarely top of mind to an IT manager. An IT manager is more likely thinking about server performance, network connectivity, application availability, etc. But tape should be an integral part of the data backup process and it should be on every IT manager’s mind. An IT manager should always be thinking about the different use cases of the data he/she is assigned to manage and keep in mind that a tape-based solution like Overland’s NEO offerings plays a vital role in the long-term data backup and archive process.

Enterprises today are more than likely using disk-based technologies to store data in the short-term … data that is mission critical, accessed frequently and needs to be retrieved within seconds. However, according to a study done by The University of California Santa Cruz, 90% of the data stored on disk is never accessed again. This doesn’t mean a company doesn’t need/shouldn’t keep the data but it does mean that they need to move that data off of disk to a more economical storage solution, saving expensive disk space for that data that needs to be retrieved frequently and instantaneously. This is where NEO comes into play. NEO solutions provide the benefit of automated, high-capacity, cost-effective, energy-efficient long-term storage, whether it’s for backup or archive. A NEO solution will provide a variety of different storage capacity points (ranging from 4.8TB to 3PB), still retrieve data extremely fast (up to 1TB/hr), minimize the use of valuable data center floorspace and provide the most energy-efficient solution for data storage. The end result is that the IT manager reduces his/her cost of ownership of the storage solution.

The Biggest Tape Challenges for Data Center and IT Managers
Given the technology advancements in tape-based solutions over the last several years, tape doesn’t pose any particular challenges to data center and IT managers from a technology point of view. Tape solutions provide clear advantages in terms of storage capacity, speed of data transfer, long-term reliability, portability, useability and affordability. The biggest challenges faced by IT managers are likely planning for the growth in data storage and making sure that they have a solution that can accommodate those changes.

The ideal automated tape storage solution seamlessly addresses the challenges faced by data centers and IT managers. Tape solutions provide clear advantages in terms of storage capacity, speed of data transfer, long-term reliability, portability, useability and affordability. The biggest challenges faced by IT managers are likely in planning for growth in data storage and making sure that they have a solution that can accommodate those changes.

In today’s economy, tight IT budgets demand storage solutions that are easy to deploy, manage and maintain without under or over buying technology. Having a solid understanding of the needs of the entire storage infrastructure is key to making the right technology decisions. Making sure that your data is protected with automated tape storage solutions such as the NEO Series from Overland Storage is vital to ensuring the ongoing availability of your company’s most critical asset.

Overcoming The Challenges
Data center and IT managers need to give careful consideration to how much data (remember the 90% rule from above) will ultimately end up on tape and make sure they choose a solution that has all of the right elements to address their useability, affordability and availability requirements.

Sound Advice
Think about cost of ownership. Considering the intense budgetary pressure most IT/data center managers are faced with, it’s easy to be drawn to a solution that has the lowest purchase price. But they should really think about what this solution is going to cost them in the long run. For example, how does the reliability of the product compare to other solutions and what impact could a potentially less reliable solution have on costs of downtime? What are the maintenance costs of the solution, both in the short-term and the long-term. How adaptable is the product to changes in storage requirements – a solution that is designed to be flexible and adaptable will incur far fewer costs in the long-term. What kind of features do you really need in your tape backup solution? It’s easy to get enticed by a lot of bells & whistles, but if you don’t really need those features, they can end up costing more money and resulting in reliability issues. How important is data availability to you and what kind of data availability features does the solution offer? For example, if you have a scaled tape library environment in which data availability is critical to you, and your solution doesn’t offer the necessary redundancy features, you’ve likely paid for a solution that doesn’t deliver what you need.

In today’s economy with tighter IT budgets companies have to buy technology affordable hardware and software that is easy to deploy, manage and maintain without under or over buying technology. Having a solid understanding of the needs for the entire storage infrastructure may lead to an unexpected technology decision. That’s why it’s so important to be diligent with planning so that there are no surprises when deployment begins.

Data Replication Means Data Recovery and Business Continuity

- Liat Malki, Director of Marketing Axxana (www.axxana.com), says:


Why is data replication useful in today's enterprise data centers?
In today's data-driven economy, a few minutes of downtime, or losing a “few” gigabytes of data, can cause substantial financial loss and damage a company's reputation. Enterprises large and small face the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, complying with complex regulations, controlling rapid data growth, and managing geographically-dispersed data centers.

Data replication solutions from Axxana set a new standard for data recovery and business continuity (DR/BC). Conforming with and exceeding the most demanding new regulations, Axxana enables enterprises of all sizes to markedly raise data replica retention rates while significantly lowering recovery and operational overhead. The technology allows organizations of all size, to enjoy zero data loss replication over any distance using asynchronous infrastructure – something that was not achievable until today.

Axxana’s Phoenix System RP (for EMC’s CLARiiON) offers the benefits of synchronous replication over asynchronous infrastructure and at asynchronous prices. Currently, the system is the only one in the marketplace that is capable of surviving any disaster while ensuring 100% data protection and recovery over any distance with no latency. It enables the replication of more data over existing communication lines and protects against data loss during link failure. All these benefits result in a rapid ROI and deliver tremendous economic value.

Axxana’s solution delivers the following:

• 100% data protection and recovery
• Unlimited distance – no geographic limitations
• No latency
• Protection against WAN link failure
• Significant costs savings

EMC's RecoverPoint sends data asynchronously to remote sites, while the Phoenix System RP protects a synchronous copy of information inside a disaster-proof "black box" storage device at the primary site. The device is designed to survive nearly any threat. Following the disaster, the Phoenix System RP enables rapid extraction of the protected data and transmission to the remote site, where the recovered information is reintegrated by EMC's RecoverPoint, with the asynchronous remote copy yielding an exact mirror image of the data in the primary data center.

When architecting a disaster recovery plan, data center and IT managers need to assess their specific regulatory requirements, geographic limitations, and of course, cost considerations. Keep in mind that you don’t have to choose between asynchronous or synchronous replication solutions. Both solutions have strengths, but also limitations. Axxana offers a third alternative that combines the best of both worlds, synchronous capabilities over asynchronous infrastructure.

Disaster Plan: Testing Frequency

- Steven Rodin, Chief Executive Officer at Storagepipe Solutions (www.storagepipe.com), says:

How often should data center and IT managers test their disaster plans?

The only effective way to test a disaster plan is through simulation. This should be done at least once per year. And when you test, you should also try different scenarios:

• What if the CEOs laptop was stolen… and it contained important data? (Try to retrieve data that was saved on a local hard drive instead of the main file server… even if that hard drive has disappeared)
• What if HR needed to retrieve 6 years worth of old files for a wrongful dismissal suit? (How long would it take you search through 6 years of historical email and locate all conversations relating to a specific topic, theme or incident?)
• How quickly can you recover a critical server in the event of power failure causing disk failure? (How quickly can you re-build a server from bare metal?)
• If the datacenter caught fire, how much downtime would the company have to endure before coming back online? How long would this take? (How long would it take you to set up a new server at another location on a moment’s notice?)

Corporate data protection is very complex. You have to deal with many different systems (email, databases, operating systems, laptops, compliance, high-availability, etc...) and each of these requires a different disaster protection approach.

The best advice would be to pick a partner that offers many different types of business data protection solutions, and to have them put together a tailored disaster recovery plan based on your IT needs. When you work through a trusted vendor for all of your backup, recovery and availability systems, it simplifies your IT management and reduces or eliminates the possibility of overlap, waste or system conflicts.

Testing Your Disaster Plan

- James Quin, lead research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com), says:

How often should data center and IT managers test their disaster plans?

Realistically speaking enterprises should be continually testing their plans. The point of testing is less about building the skills to Enterprises should try to avoid testing the DR in “broad strokes” – the likelihood that catastrophic failures will occur is far lower than the likelihood of localized “small-scale” outages. Further, broad testing requires a tremendous leveraging of resources while scenario testing can be accomplished with less effort. Over time, the sum of the work performed in scenario testing will more than equate to the gains that can be made with catastrophic failure testing.

Top Priority: Yearly Tape Audits

- Kim Gross, Business Development with American Eagle Systems (www.americaneaglesys.com), says:

Got $3.43 Million to spare?

No? Because that was the average cost to a company in 2009 that suffered a data breach or lost back up tape. The good news is that the overall number of data loss incidents seems to be decreasing, but the careless disposal of tape media has increased significantly. And if you don’t know exactly what back-up media you have and where you have it, the opportunity for mishandling your assets increase. The bottom line is that you can’t manage what you can’t find. But there are tools available to help.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. How do you ensure the right tapes go offsite or to your customer locations?
2. Do you have trouble gathering data and producing comprehensive reports on your tape library inventory to comply with audit and regulatory concerns?
3. When it is time to destroy your backup tapes, do you have a way of tracking and ensuring the proper media is pulled for destruction?

Data center managers need web-based tools that can track tape media not only back and forth to the vault, but to all locations. The solution should also keep an audit history of all of your media, and give your personnel the tools to not only manage media, but ensure compliance.

Yearly tape audits should also be a priority for your organization. Partnering with an independent third party that can perform most audits in one day, while allowing your normal business operations to continue, will make this process painless. Audits such as these highlight issues such as tape media that is at your facility that shouldn’t be, or tapes that you thought were onsite that are not. In many circumstances, there is media that is found either onsite or at your offsite storage facility that is no longer needed.

Why are you paying for offsite storage on tapes that are past their retention date? When it comes time to destroy your backup media, there are numerous options for both onsite and offsite destruction. You’ll need a partner familiar with the processes, one that can assist in providing detailed reports indicating what was destroyed so that you have a record for your auditors.

Your data is your company’s most important asset. American Eagle Systems can help you manage it.

Disaster Recovery: He Who Barks Loudest Doesn’t Recover First

- Richard Dolewski, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Continuity Services for WTS (www.wts.com), says:

Disaster recovery scenario:  The servers are all down. The computer room is dark. A major disaster has occurred and you need to determine your next steps. What are your priorities? What task do you do first? In which order do you start your server recovery? Everything is a business priority, according to the business experts. Quick, lock the doors because a stampede of self proclaimed experts is about to come charging into the computer room and start barking out orders.

Are you going to listen to the person with the loudest bark and get his server back up and running first?  If not, what IS your top priority?  The computer systems may or may not be recoverable in the short term. Maybe they are not available for the long term either. You take a deep breath and tell yourself this is what we have been documenting and practicing for all these years. But does your current disaster recovery plan include prioritization of server recovery in a disaster?

Managing Mission Critical Servers for Business Continuity

There is a lot of work that goes into managing the on-going requirements for mission critical servers. When you have downtime, for whatever reason, data is unavailable to your customers, and this usually means that business – yours and your customers’ --simply stops.  When business stops, it gets very expensive in a hurry. This is why critical server requirements should be reviewed twice a year to ensure that effective server processes are being carried out to support the true needs of the business and to ensure that these identified servers are still in alignment with business goals and priorities.  Listed below are the elements that should be reviewed on a regular basis to support the critical server definition requirements.

• Business impact analysis and risk assessment

• Strategy for server recovery

• Change in prioritization based on different business cycles

• Application dependencies and interdependencies

• Application downtime considerations for planned and unplanned outages

• Backup procedures

• Offsite storage for vital records

• Data retention policies

• Recovery time objectives (RTO)

• Recovery point objectives (RPO )

• Hardware for critical server recovery

• Alternate recovery site selection

• IT and business management signoff

Classifying Systems for Disaster Recovery Priority

When you walk into the computer room it’s easy to be overwhelmed with rows and rows of servers. Numerous hardware platforms are powered on and ready to serve some business purpose. Typically you’ll find that the servers span several hardware generations. What’s required is a planned roadmap and prioritized recovery of your complete critical server infrastructure. You need to understand the supporting business needs of all servers in advance of any disaster ever occurring. Don’t wait for that phone call at 4 a.m. to decide your server recovery strategy. All the servers that reside in your computer room are not equal in level of importance to your business. That is why you need to consider the difference between:

• what you need
• what you want to have
• what you don’t need at all to run your business in a disaster.

The backup recovery team should assign priorities to the servers as they relate to your business support priorities.  There will be a mixed bag of opinions, of course, but a good Business Impact Analysis will reveal which of those opinions carry the most weight. You should categorize the business requirements and supporting servers as Critical, Essential, Necessary, or Optional, as follows;

• Critical Systems – Absolutely these servers must be in place for any business process to continue at all. These systems have a significant financial impact on the viability of your organization. Extended loss of these servers will cause a long term disruption to the business, and potentially cause legal and financial ramifications. These should be on the A-List of your disaster recovery strategy.
• Essential Systems – These servers must be in place to support day-to-day operations and are typically integrated with Critical Systems.  These systems play an important role in delivering your business solution. These should also be on the A-List recovery strategy.
• Necessary Systems – These servers contribute to improved business operations and provide improved productivity for employees. However, they are not mandatory at a time of disaster. These might include business forecasting tools, reporting, or maybe improvement tools utilized by the business. In other words, minimal business or financial impact. The targeted systems can be easily restored as part of the B-List recovery strategy.
• Optional Systems – These servers may or may not enhance the productivity of your organization. Optional systems may include test systems, archived or historical data, company Intranet and non-essential complementary products. These servers can be excluded from your recovery strategy.

These server classifications will provide you with the baseline for your decision making matrix. The key is your IT recovery team and your business management team must agree with the disaster recovery planning scope for classifications of the servers. By differentiating between critical, essential, necessary and optional, the reduction in the number of servers required to support the disaster recovery plan not only helps increase backup and recovery efficiency for the servers, but it also helps reduce your financial budget for disaster recovery.

The Big Picture

When compiling the list of mission critical applications, you must also consider application interdependencies. First, many software solutions are considered modular in design yet the software must be 100 percent intact -- in other words, fully restored to function correctly. You cannot break the applications apart from the supporting infrastructure for the server. You may choose not to utilize specific business functions, but the entire solution must be rebuilt 100 percent to function normally.

Second, consider the flow of information. Follow the flow of a transaction from order inception to product delivery. You may find that a server not considered critical by the Business Impact Analysis does indeed have a significant role in feeding information back to yet another identified mission critical application. Therefore, IT input is needed in addition to the defined business needs.  The restoration process for most servers is generally recovered in its entirety which includes every user library saved on the system. The question is, are you restoring too much? Omitting non-critical libraries can save hours, which translates to the business coming online more quickly in a disaster. The libraries and user directories that could be omitted include:

• Performances data

• Audit journals

• Test libraries

• ERP walk-through libraries

• Online education

• Developer libraries

• User test environments

• Data archives

• EDI successful transmission objects

• Trial software

• Temporary product work directories

• Auxiliary Storage Pools (ASP s)

• Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools (IASP )

Required Hardware for Your Disaster Recovery Plan

In the development of every disaster recovery plan, you must determine the minimum hardware requirements for your mission critical servers. Some IT professionals will say: “Obviously, you want your mission-critical servers to run the exact same equipment. However, in an emergency, any equipment is better than none. After all, it’s a disaster, not production.”

This statement should not be accepted at face value. The reality is, only mission-critical applications absolutely need to be restored in a disaster, not everything. However, you will  need to ask whether your business will accept running the “Mission Critical “ business functions at say 50 percent less capacity or throughput. In most cases, the answer will be no -- totally unacceptable.

In the Business Impact Analysis you identified the financial impacts for your organization of being down for an extended period of time. Running your business at half speed will only further cripple your long term business capabilities and will not ensure customer satisfaction. Reduce the disaster recovery footprint by eliminating non-essential applications rather than providing less processing capabilities. Invest your disaster recovery budget wisely by supporting your business requirements in a disaster, and that means getting the right hardware. The last thing you want is your sales order desk telling customers to be patient; we can only process half the orders right now because we had a disaster and we are still working things out.

The Human Element

What if you declared a disaster and your staff did not show? Your servers can’t recover themselves. Many companies have plans that address their equipment requirements and recovery processes but often underestimate the amount of staff required to successfully execute their plan. Equipment only works if somebody is able to operate it. In Gulf coast hurricanes, key personnel have been displaced or unavailable due to health risks or personal priorities. 

When regional disasters hit, transportation within the area can be difficult and may result in your staff being unable to reach their assigned locations. Equipment may be accessible, but it will be ineffective if your staff cannot access the recovery site. What is the level of expertise your employees possess when they finally do reach the recovery site?

Too many companies, especially those that perform recovery tests with no more than their data center staff, often count on IT heroics to pull them out of a crisis. Expecting IT to perform a miracle in an outage is difficult for your staff and avoidable today when full recovery tests can be performed without impacting your production users. When your disaster recovery plan includes cross departmental staffing, it is important to have detailed and precise documentation. Companies should create recovery documentation so that anyone in the business, from the shipping manager to the CFO, can start a recovery. In a well tested plan, an employee from another department should be able to start the recovery in the event employees from your IT staff are not available. You may never know if all your key personnel will be able to assist with the recovery. After identifying your critical equipment, it is a good idea to test your disaster recovery plan with a subgroup of assigned individuals while leaving the remainder of the team to run normal business operations. The success or failure will be a good indicator of your corporate readiness.

Summary

When the servers are down, your disaster recovery plan will determine the precise server recovery strategy and recovery priorities. So, lock the doors to keep the stampeding herd of users away. Fire up the iPod, plug in your earphones, and start recovering the business as stated in the plan. Step through the tasks and follow the precise order of server recovery by predetermined importance criteria versus listening to who screams the loudest.  And tune out the noise while listening to your favorite disaster recovery iPod tunes!