What
is Disaster Recovery?
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In the information
technology (IT) community, disaster
recovery is the ability of a
network to restart operations after a disaster. A
disaster is defined as anything
that can compromise your information system and includes such events
as a hardware (hard drive or server) failure, theft, fire, flood,
hurricane, etc. Good disaster recovery planning covers so much
more than simply having data backups.
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ARE YOU PREPARED?
Can
your company survive a computer systems disaster? How
important is your company's information system to the success of
your business? If your business is like most, your information
system is critical. Without a properly functioning information
system and the data it contains, how long can your business operate?
How much revenue would you lose for every hour and every day of
downtime?
PLANNING:
Disaster recovery planning is a complex,
time consuming, and resource consuming process with little obvious
benefit up front. However, your company's very survival may
depend on it. Recently, hurricane Katrina struck our area with
devastating consequences. Many businesses computer systems
were flooded and totally destroyed. What do you suppose will
be the fate of those businesses that failed to do even the minimum
of disaster planning?
A comprehensive disaster recovery plan
not only cover the basics such as backing up your critical data but
includes contingency planning. For example, the plan may
layout how your company will move its information systems to another
location in the event of a natural disaster. We can help you
develop and implement a disaster recovery plan that is tailored to
your company's needs, from a comprehensive written disaster recovery
plan, to providing the very minimum of precautions such as data
backup. Contact us today for a
free consultation.
OUR DATA PROTECTION STRATEGY:
An integral part of any effective disaster recovery
plan is to have a multi-pronged data protection approach. That
is, you do not rely solely on one
protection measure but have multiple
layers of protection. We have developed a multi-pronged data
protection strategy tailored for the small business needs as
follows: fault-tolerant data storage, periodic drive imaging, regular system
backups, and off-site storage.
Fault Tolerant Data Storage:
In networking terms, fault tolerance refers to the ability of
a device or system to continue operating in the event of failure.
Fault tolerance is most often accomplished for data storage on
servers by the implementation of a RAID (Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Disks) system. With a fault-tolerant RAID, one
hard drive can fail and the system keeps running.
We recommend that you implement a
fault-tolerant RAID array on your server. Below is
a brief description of two recommended RAID
implementations.
-
RAID 5 is the preferred hard
disk fault-tolerant strategy for most environments. It
requires a minimum of three equal-sized physical hard drives to
implement but can contain up to 32. RAID 5 spreads (or
stripes) the data and parity information across all drives in
the array in such a way that if any one drive fails, the missing
data can be calculated from the remaining drives.
Increased read performance is realized with RAID 5. With
RAID 5, the total storage capacity is calculated by adding the
capacity of the total number of drives in the array, minus one.
For example, a RAID 5 built with three 100GB drives would yield
a 200GB total storage capacity. ( 100 x 3 ) - 100 = 200
-
RAID 1 is a fault-tolerant
hard disk configuration know as disk mirroring. A RAID 1
solution requires two equal-sized physical disks where any data
saved to the first disk is also automatically saved to the
second disk as well. If either disk fails, the data is
still available on the other disk. RAID 1 offers no
performance increase and has a 50% disk space overhead.
Two 100GB disks configured in a RAID 1 yields only 100GB of
storage space. Perhaps the strongest advantage of RAID 1
is its lower cost.
Periodic Drive Imaging:
Drive
imaging is the processes of preserving your entire hard drive
exactly as it is—byte for byte onto backup media in a compressed
format. In essence, drive imaging
saves a snapshot of your hard drive partition so you can restore the
drive or partition to an identical state at a later date.
The image can be stored on tape or, preferably, on another hard
drive. The primary advantage of a drive image is the ability
to restore the server to a running state relatively quickly without
having to reload and reconfigure the operating system. We
recommend implementing a scheduled procedure where periodic images
of your server are created.
Regular System Backup:
The term
system backup as used here, is
defined as the use of the Windows operating system backup
functionality to create a file-by-file backup of your system and
data. We use a
full backup where possible to allow for maximum
flexibility in the restoring process. Also, we typically
schedule the full backup to run every night. This backup
should be written to some type of removable media. In the
past, this was typically tape. But today, we recommend a
removable hard drive as the destination of the backup.
Finally, one set of the removable media should be stored off-site.
Removable Hard Drive System for
Off-Site Storage:
A key
component of our off-site data
protection strategy is to store all backups and disk images on a
removable hard drive cartridge that is stored off-site. In
years past, tape devices were developed because hard drives were
expensive. Back then, tape was an inexpensive medium to store
backup data when compared to the cost of hard drives. However
today the reverse is true. Where a tape drive and controller
can cost over $1000, an additional hard drive costs less than half
that much. Furthermore, the new SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive
technology supports hot swapping. By combining a hot swappable
SATA hard drive and a removable rack system, you have a hot
swappable solution where you can have multiple drive cartridges to
facilitate keeping one cartridge off-site.
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