Disaster recovery - saving your business (page 1 of 2)

Scheduling tape backups for both efficiency and completeness is essential to any tape-backup plan. When daily backups become unmanageable, it's time to consider both incremental and differential backup schemes.

In many cases, however, tape backup is just not enough, especially when the company in question serves millions of people every day. That's when a host based replication is an effective solution.
In recovering from an IT disaster, timing is everything.

Costs inconvenience can mount quickly with each minute that access is denied to critical systems, networks and data. That's why it's essential to have a plan for getting your data back, whether that means replicating your entire network or just the critical pieces of it, using company-owned or outside resources.
Downtime costs vary from industry to industry, based on dependency upon technology and typical labour costs.

Companies that are the most dependent upon automated systems, such as energy, financial services and telecommunications enterprises, accrue an average of nearly $8 million in losses for every hour of downtime, based on lost revenue and employee idling. IT-dependent manufacturing companies suffer per-hour revenue losses of $3 million. Health care, media and hospitality/travel companies, less dependent upon IT infrastructure, lose $1.5 million of revenue per hour.

But vulnerability is a relative thing. Dollar losses may not be your primary concern if you're in charge of, say, a utility company whose IT outages can leave customers without heat. Protracted outages also can translate into a loss of customer confidence. That's a major vulnerability for even the smallest just-in-time manufacturer or e-business.

If your organisation can handle the hefty price, you can attack the problem of business continuity by replicating everything in your production environment at an alternate backup disaster recovery facility.

You can use high-speed networks and storage and server mirroring to provide instantaneous failover from one site to the other for hiccup-free disaster recovery.
Most companies, however, can't afford a strategy of full redundancy. For these enterprises, specialised vendors can help replace critical IT infrastructure.

Traditional business recovery-service vendors, such as Comdisco Continuity Services, Hewlett-Packard Co. Business Recovery Services, VERITAS Software and IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services, make up one part of this market. The theory is that hammering out recovery logistics before an interruption occurs will speed recovery in the wake of a lightning strike, flood or other natural disaster.

Modern storage-recovery requirements present a problem for conventional business-continuity planning. With the proper logistics, provisions can be made to replace system platforms, networks and even user work areas quickly, but the real key to recovery is time to data. How rapidly data can be restored for use by business applications, decision-makers and customers is the ultimate determinant of successful recovery.

Given this fact, the proliferation both in volume of data and in the type and topology of storage platforms within an enterprise can create requirements that will make or break the efficacy of all other recovery plans.

Platform Proliferation
Topologies for storage within the corporate IT infrastructure have proliferated. DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) is out; networked storage, including NAS (Network-Attached Storage) and SANs (Storage Area Networks), is in.