HFTP News
June 1, 20103 min read

Virtually Avoiding IT Disaster

When disaster strikes, will your IT department be ready? Are you prepared for a worst-case-scenario in your data center?

Information Technology
By Lyle Worthington, Technology Executive and Consultant & Past President of HFTP Global

Business Continuity Planning

Developing a business continuity plan is critical for ensuring that, should a disaster occur, your business can return to normal quickly with the least amount of interruption and data loss as possible. Business continuity planning should cover much more than just your servers, software and PCs, as a recovery from any sort of disaster would most certainly affect the entire organization. For the purposes of this article, however, I will be referring only to the backup and recovery of your servers and data.

A good business continuity plan (BCP) starts with a risk assessment. How much do you stand to lose (financially, operationally via productivity losses, long term via drop in customer perception, etc.) every second that a server or application is unavailable? Where are all of the points of failure in your server room that could cause a significant outage? Your goal is to design a solution that mitigates these risks while keeping the cost of the solution low enough to justify the expense, based on probability that the disaster will occur.

Not every server or application will need to be restored immediately or with zero data loss. You are planning for recovery from a complete disaster, so you should think about this as not just a typical backup and restore plan. Some applications can stay down, some can run on slower hardware with fewer people accessing them, and some will need to be up immediately on comparable hardware with no data loss. These are all factors to consider when you do your risk assessment and write your BCP.

At one extreme you could have an exact mirror of your data center in another location (or several locations). The hardware might be different, but there would be enough of it to bring your entire environment online immediately with a minimally noticeable performance drop. You might even be load balancing between the data centers. This is the most expensive way to do it, but provides the most redundant system. At the opposite extreme, you might just back everything up to tape and put the tapes in a lock box off property. In this case, if your server room explodes, you would have to procure all new equipment, get your backup tapes and slowly rebuild everything– losing any data that had changed since your last backup. Downtime could be days or even weeks.

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Lyle Worthington
Lyle Worthington
Technology Executive and Consultant & Past President of HFTP Global

HFTP

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