Disaster Recovery Planning - Blogs

How will the recession impact your DRP and BCP process

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

As the recession takes hold some enterprises are failing to stay on top of their DRP and BCP processes. Is that happening at your company?

Age of Wireless LANs is with us

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Because they free users from the need to be cabled to a physical network, wireless LANs are being used as an access vehicle to help businesses better collaborate. Wireless LANs can improve business process efficiencies, provide scalability, improve infrastructure costs, contribute to customer and employee satisfaction, and help resolve business continuity issues. When considering a wireless LAN implementation, users should address security, bandwidth, roaming, and interference issues.

Disk to Disk (D2D) Could be a Qucik Solution to Tape Problems

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

The last few years have seen a number of information technology trends converge, transforming disk-to-disk backup (D2D) from something merely feasible into an attractive addition to the IT portfolio.

D2D technology brings many key benefits to your IT infrastructure, including shorter backup windows, faster restores, quicker nearline access, investment protection by leveraging existing tape hardware, and better backup economy through incremental backups.

For several decades, tape drives and tape media have been the preferred enterprise backup solution. But now, modern backup software supports writing to a disk file as though it was another backup device. Often this is implemented by emulating a tape device with special characteristics, allowing the disk file to easily integrate into the rest of the existing software architecture. The common term for this is virtual tape. Some backup software also supports the creation of multiple emulated devices and combining them into virtual tape libraries, referred to as VTL. D2D backup uses these virtual tapes to save backup data by writing to the VTL, and restores the backup data by reading from the VTL. Using hard disk drives as the underlying storage media brings all the advantages of random access, high volume manufacturing, disk reliability, RAID, and familiar technology.

How Much Downtime Can You Tolerate

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. More and more organizations of all sizes now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.

Cyber Attack Can Impact Your Disaster Plan

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

A cyber attack reported last week by one of the federal government's nuclear weapons laboratories may have originated in China, according to a confidential memorandum distributed Wednesday to public and private security officials by the Department of Homeland Security.

Security researchers said the memorandum, which was obtained by The New York Times from an executive at a private company, included a list of Web and Internet addresses that were linked to locations in China. However, they noted that such links did not prove that the Chinese government or Chinese citizens were involved in the attacks. In the past, intruders have compromised computers in China and then used them to disguise their true location.

Officials at the lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the attacks did not compromise classified information, though they acknowledged that they were still working to understand the full extent of the intrusion.

- more info

How does the Vista "Kill Switch" Impact the DRP

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

With the elimination of the Vista "kill switch" feature will there be any impact on your Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan.

We say no, as a matter of fact this should simplify the Disaster Recovery Process with the elimination of that feature. What are your thoughts?

Key Components of a Disaster Plan

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity and security experts at Janco have identified several critical steps in planning for disaster and subsequent recovery.

1. Determine how the event will impact four key areas:

· People: How will you notify, evacuate, transport and care for employees?

· Property: What equipment will you need and how will you source it?

· Systems: What portions of your computing and telecommunications infrastructure must be duplicated immediately? How much downtime can your operation tolerate?

· Data: What data is critical to run your business, and how will you recover critical data that is lost?

2. Determine which data, applications and systems must be restored and in what sequence. Prioritize systems as critical, vital, sensitive or noncritical, and talk to users at all levels to make sure youre not overlooking any crucial systems.

3. Analyze the hardware and software configurations that support critical business functions and isolate possible points of failure.

4. Quantify hourly costs based on interruptions of these systems.

Each of these is included in the Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template that can be found at http://www.itproductivity.org/Disaster-Recovery-Planning.htm

more info

Recovery point and recovery time objectives

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the amount of data loss a customer can tolerate, specifically the point in time to which your enterprise must be able to recover the data. Some enterprises require an RPO of “zero”. That means the enterprise cannot lose a single committed transaction in the event of a site failure; they must be able to recover the data back to the zero minute of the time of the disaster. There are implications to setting up an RPO of zero. The replication solution will require synchronous replication (explained in detail later in this section) and may impact performance of the application being replicated.

An RPO of greater than zero, for example 30 minutes, can be handled differently. An RPO of 30 minutes means the customer can tolerate losing the last 30 minutes of transactions in the event of a site failure. If the disaster occurred at 12:00, the customer must be able to recover the data to at least 11:30 (30 minutes prior to the disaster). This can most likely be accomplished with asynchronous replication with minimal performance impact to the application. In this situation, careful planning and monitoring of the write-history log is essential to support the expected RPO.

A RPO can only be determined by their business rules and other governances of their environment. The customer must weigh the risk of data loss in a higher RPO against the cost and performance impact of a zero RPO.

Recovery time objective (RTO) refers to the amount of time it takes a customer to get their backup site up and running after a complete failure at the primary site. Most customers have an RTO of anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours, though the average is about 2 hours. This includes the time to failover the replicated LUNs (logical Unit Number) to the backup EVA (Enterprise Virtural Array) , recover the backup database and bring it online, and redirect any applications to the backup database server. A faster RTO can usually be accomplished by prestaging the backup site to the greatest extent possible.

What is Business Continuity

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 MST

In the volatile world we live in today, any business in the world could be jeopardised by any number of external influences, how can you prepare your business correctly to cope with the unexpected crises that could occur at any time With the western world being on a constantly heightened security alert, natural disasters occurring more and more frequently and other threats that have not even been predicted, today's world is a risky place to live in

Email is a high risk application that DRP needs to consider first

no@spam.com (Site Administrator) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 MST

In order to effectively use email as a business tool, these security issues must be addressed from a technical, managerial, and regulatory perspective. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula, product, or service that will handle all of these aspects of email. At least in the foreseeable future, email security will require some form of human and/or manual intervention.

There are, however, some highly effective solutions that can help with these issues from the executive level all the way to end users. A smart decision for the practical businessperson is to automate as much of the technical, managerial, and regulatory requirements as possible. This is especially important for small and medium businesses that are dealing with fewer IT and security resources.