Disaster Recovery - Scenario 4

This solution is suitable for a larger business with 6-100 physical and/or virtual servers with a SAN (Storage Area Network) and many terabytes of data such that tape backup is not possible and extremely fast recovery is required.

1. Firstly, make sure that all your valuable data is stored on one of the servers rather than on workstations or laptops. This is good practice generally as it aids sharing of data and avoids people having duplicate copies of things.
2. Purchase a backup 'appliance' (an appliance is a collection of computer hardware and software pre-built and dedicated to a single purpose) like that provided by Actifio. One half of the appliance lives on site with the SAN and the other half is located at a separate data centre. These devices use some very clever de-duplication software and extremely efficient compression techniques to store the data on the device. Once the initial copy of all the servers has been made on the appliance, only changed data is transmitted, which is usually a surprisingly small amount.

In the event of a disaster, the copies of the servers would be mounted as a virtual image on standby or replacements servers, either at your site or at the data centre very quickly. Each server can be up again within minutes, with a whole set of 30-40 servers operational within hours with virtually no data loss. The appliance handles the backup and recovery of files, emails and SharePoint data too, extremely quickly and easily so tape backup is no longer required.

Pros:

• Virtually no loss of data in the event of server failure
• Very fast recovery time
• Protects against disasters affecting the whole site like fire and flood
• Enables emergency home and remote working to be part of the disaster recovery plan
• Cost is justifiable for companies needing this sort of protection and most can actually save a significant amount of money compared to other solutions.

Cons:

• The appliances are expensive
• Doesn't cope with a failure of both appliances - but this is highly unlikely to happen.

Typical cost: Around £200K for the full solution, including standby server options at a data centre.

Remember that with all backup solutions you should check your backup logs for error messages and ensure that all your data is actually being backed up by doing regular 'trial restores'.

With an investment like this you will want to document your disaster recovery plan in detail, keep a copy offsite and do an annual 'dress rehearsal' where testing of the disaster recovery process is carried out and validated to ensure that all the data was recovered. This is also an opportunity to update the process and make any changes that might be required to ensure that all aspects are covered.

This is only one of many disaster recovery and business continuity solutions offered by Samarind. No two businesses are alike, and we tailor each business' disaster recovery solution to match their requirements. If you are a smaller business check our scenarios 1, 2 and 3 and contact us to find out more.