Disaster recovery scenario: The servers are all down. The computer room is dark. A major disaster has occurred and you need to determine your next steps. What are your priorities? What task do you do first? In which order do you start your server recovery? Everything is a business priority, according to the business experts. Quick, lock the doors because a stampede of self proclaimed experts is about to come charging into the computer room and start barking out orders.

Are you going to listen to the person with the loudest bark and get his server back up and running first? If not, what IS your top priority? The computer systems may or may not be recoverable in the short term. Maybe they are not available for the long term either. You take a deep breath and tell yourself this is what we have been documenting and practicing for all these years. But does your current disaster recovery plan include prioritization of server recovery in a disaster?

Managing Mission Critical Servers for Business Continuity

There is a lot of work that goes into managing the on-going requirements for mission critical servers. When you have downtime, for whatever reason, data is unavailable to your customers, and this usually means that business – yours and your customers’ –simply stops. When business stops, it gets very expensive in a hurry. This is why critical server requirements should be reviewed twice a year to ensure that effective server processes are being carried out to support the true needs of the business and to ensure that these identified servers are still in alignment with business goals and priorities. Listed below are the elements that should be reviewed on a regular basis to support the critical server definition requirements.

? Business impact analysis and risk assessment
? Strategy for server recovery
? Change in prioritization based on different business cycles
? Application dependencies and interdependencies
? Application downtime considerations for planned and unplanned outages
? Backup procedures
? Offsite storage for vital records
? Data retention policies
? Recovery time objectives (RTO)
? Recovery point objectives (RPO )
? Hardware for critical server recovery
? Alternate recovery site selection
? IT and business management signoff

Classifying Systems for Disaster Recovery Priority

When you walk into the computer room it’s easy to be overwhelmed with rows and rows of servers. Numerous hardware platforms are powered on and ready to serve some business purpose. Typically you’ll find that the servers span several hardware generations. What’s required is a planned roadmap and prioritized recovery of your complete critical server infrastructure. You need to understand the supporting business needs of all servers in advance of any disaster ever occurring. Don’t wait for that phone call at 4 a.m. to decide your server recovery strategy. All the servers that reside in your computer room are not equal in level of importance to your business. That is why you need to consider the difference between what you need, what you want to have, and what you don’t need at all to run your business in a disaster.

The backup recovery team should assign priorities to the servers as they relate to your business support priorities. There will be a mixed bag of opinions, of course, but a good Business Impact Analysis will reveal which of those opinions carry the most weight. You should categorize the business requirements and supporting servers as Critical, Essential, Necessary, or Optional, as follows;

Critical Systems – Absolutely these servers must be in place for any business process to continue at all. These systems have a significant financial impact on the viability of your organization. Extended loss of these servers will cause a long term disruption to the business, and potentially cause legal and financial ramifications. These should be on the A-List of your disaster recovery strategy.

Essential Systems – These servers must be in place to support day-to-day operations and are typically integrated with Critical Systems. These systems play an important role in delivering your business solution. These should also be on the A-List recovery strategy.

Necessary Systems – These servers contribute to improved business operations and provide improved productivity for employees. However, they are not mandatory at a time of disaster. These might include business forecasting tools, reporting, or maybe improvement tools utilized by the business. In other words, minimal business or financial impact. The targeted systems can be easily restored as part of the B-List recovery strategy.

Optional Systems – These servers may or may not enhance the productivity of your organization. Optional systems may include test systems, archived or historical data, company Intranet and non-essential complementary products. These servers can be excluded from your recovery strategy.

These server classifications will provide you with the baseline for your decision making matrix. The key is your IT recovery team and your business management team must agree with the disaster recovery planning scope for classifications of the servers. By differentiating between critical, essential, necessary and optional, the reduction in the number of servers required to support the disaster recovery plan not only helps increase backup and recovery efficiency for the servers, but it also helps reduce your financial budget for disaster recovery.

The Big Picture

When compiling the list of mission critical applications, you must also consider application interdependencies. First, many software solutions are considered modular in design yet the software must be 100 percent intact — in other words, fully restored to function correctly. You cannot break the applications apart from the supporting infrastructure for the server. You may choose not to utilize specific business functions, but the entire solution must be rebuilt 100 percent to function normally.

Second, consider the flow of information. Follow the flow of a transaction from order inception to product delivery. You may find that a server not considered critical by the Business Impact Analysis does indeed have a significant role in feeding information back to yet another identified mission critical application. Therefore, IT input is needed in addition to the defined business needs. The restoration process for most servers is generally recovered in its entirety which includes every user library saved on the system. The question is, are you restoring too much? Omitting non-critical libraries can save hours, which translates to the business coming online more quickly in a disaster. The libraries and user directories that could be omitted include:

? Performances data
? Audit journals
? Test libraries
? ERP walk-through libraries
? Online education
? Developer libraries
? User test environments
? Data archives
? EDI successful transmission objects
? Trial software
? Temporary product work directories
? Auxiliary Storage Pools (ASP s)
? Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools (IASP )

Required Hardware for Your Disaster Recovery Plan

In the development of every disaster recovery plan, you must determine the minimum hardware requirements for your mission critical servers. Some IT professionals will say: “Obviously, you want your mission-critical servers to run the exact same equipment. However, in an emergency, any equipment is better than none. After all, it’s a disaster, not production.” This statement should not be accepted at face value. The reality is, only mission-critical applications absolutely need to be restored in a disaster, not everything. However, you will need to ask whether your business will accept running the “Mission Critical ” business functions at say 50 percent less capacity or throughput. In most cases, the answer will be no — totally unacceptable.

In the Business Impact Analysis you identified the financial impacts for your organization of being down for an extended period of time. Running your business at half speed will only further cripple your long term business capabilities and will not ensure customer satisfaction. Reduce the disaster recovery footprint by eliminating non-essential applications rather than providing less processing capabilities. Invest your disaster recovery budget wisely by supporting your business requirements in a disaster, and that means getting the right hardware. The last thing you want is your sales order desk telling customers to be patient; we can only process half the orders right now because we had a disaster and we are still working things out.

The Human Element

What if you declared a disaster and your staff did not show? Your servers can’t recover themselves. Many companies have plans that address their equipment requirements and recovery processes but often underestimate the amount of staff required to successfully execute their plan. Equipment only works if somebody is able to operate it. In Gulf coast hurricanes, key personnel have been displaced or unavailable due to health risks or personal priorities. When regional disasters hit, transportation within the area can be difficult and may result in your staff being unable to reach their assigned locations. Equipment may be accessible, but it will be ineffective if your staff cannot access the recovery site. What is the level of expertise your employees possess when they finally do reach the recovery site? Too many companies, especially those that perform recovery tests with no more than their data center staff, often count on IT heroics to pull them out of a crisis. Expecting IT to perform a miracle in an outage is difficult for your staff and avoidable today when full recovery tests can be performed without impacting your production users. When your disaster recovery plan includes cross departmental staffing, it is important to have detailed and precise documentation. Companies should create recovery documentation so that anyone in the business, from the shipping manager to the CFO, can start a recovery. In a well tested plan, an employee from another department should be able to start the recovery in the event employees from your IT staff are not available. You may never know if all your key personnel will be able to assist with the recovery. After identifying your critical equipment, it is a good idea to test your disaster recovery plan with a subgroup of assigned individuals while leaving the remainder of the team to run normal business operations. The success or failure will be a good indicator of your corporate readiness.

Summary

When the servers are down, your disaster recovery plan will determine the precise server recovery strategy and recovery priorities. So, lock the doors to keep the stampeding herd of users away. Fire up the iPod, plug in your earphones, and start recovering the business as stated in the plan. Step through the tasks and follow the precise order of server recovery by predetermined importance criteria versus listening to who screams the loudest. And tune out the noise while listening to your favorite disaster recovery iPod tunes!

About the author:

Richard Dolewski is a certified systems integration specialist and disaster recovery planner. As Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Continuity Services for WTS, he has extensive experience in disaster recovery planning, backup and recovery program design, and high availability solutions. His recent book, System i Disaster Recovery Planning, is available on-line at amazon.com.

Company website: http://www.wts.com/disasterrecovery.asp

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_Dolewski

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For the duration of this piece we will be carefully taking a deeper look at the rich history of data storage. We are going to cover all of the popular forms of storage that have been available to people, throughout the history of the computer. Some younger people might not be very familiar with the earliest forms of technology that we’ll be discussing, but that’s the point of reading this.

The first decided way to store computer data effectively was through the use of density disks. These were also commonly referred to as floppy disc’s. The first floppies were actually very large, they were eight inches in size and introduced to the world in the early seventies. By the late seventies they grew in popularity and could store just under eighty kilobytes on one disk!

The first type of floppy disc’s that grew in popularity with the creation of the personal computer were the five and a quarter sized disc’s. These disc’s were often used to store the operating system as well because hard drives were not as available and far too expensive for most consumers. Some of these disc’s could store of to three hundred and sixty kilobytes. We weren’t yet up to half a megabyte yet.

The third kind of floppy was the last type of popular density disc before the technology fell out of use because of the invention of more efficient mediums. This floppy was three and a quarter inches in size and was only used to store some software as well as personal files because hard drives had become affordable by this point and we very commonly being used for not only operating systems but storing other things as well.

The hard drives of the past were very crude compared to the type of hard disc’s that we have become accustomed to today. They only held a fraction of the information that today’s hard drive could store. A great deal of computers in the mid nineties had hard drives that were under the four gigabyte range. Optical disc media, like Cd’s became more popular for storing software than floppies.

Today, hard drives are capable of storing thousands of gigabytes as a time and come in external, “plug and play” models. The external hard drive kind of evolved into a new form of storage in a class all of its own. We are of course talking about the very tiny flash drives that are seen so commonly hanging from the key chains of college students the entire world over.

Today, optical disc technology for the home is so common, that we can read and write on all popular forms of optical style media. People very commonly store data to not only Cd’s, but to DVDs and Blu-ray disc’s as well. A Blu-ray disc can store up to fifty gigabytes on one dual layer disc. Web networks often utilize large servers as a way of storing files that they consider to be important.

By now, you should have a good idea of how very rich the history of data storage is. The next time you are holding a Blu-ray disc that has fifty gigabytes of data stored on it, consider that the earliest density style disc’s couldn’t even hold a tenth of a single megabyte.

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Private cloud computing offers a number of significant advantages – including lower costs, faster server deployments, and higher levels of resiliency. What is often over looked is how the Private Cloud can dramatically changes the game for IT disaster recovery in terms of significantly lower costs, faster recovery times, and enhanced testability.

Before we talk about the private cloud, let’s explore the challenges of IT disaster recovery for traditional server systems.

Most legacy IT systems are comprised of a heterogeneous set of hardware platforms – added to the system over time – with different processors, memory, drives, BIOS, and I/O systems. In a production environment, these heterogeneous systems work as designed, and the applications are loaded onto the servers and maintained and patched over time.

Offsite backups of these heterogeneous systems can be performed and safely stored at an offsite location. There are really 2 options for backing up and restoring the systems:

1) Back up the data only - where the files are backed up from the local server hard drives to the offsite location either through tapes, online or between data centers over a dedicated fiber connection. The goal is to assure that all of the data is captured and recoverable. To recover the server in the case of a disaster, the operating system needs to be reloaded and patched to the same level as the production server, the applications need to be reloaded, re-patched, and configured, and then the backed up data can be restored to the server. Reloading the operating system and applications can be a time consuming process, and assuring that the system and applications are patched to the same levels as the production server can be subject to human memory and error – both of which can lengthen the recovery time. (This is why I hate upgrading my laptop hardware. I have to invest days to get a new laptop to match the configuration of my old laptop).

2) Bare Metal Restore - a much faster way to recover the entire system. BMR creates an entire snapshot of the operating system, applications, system registry and data files, and restores the entire system on similar hardware exactly as it was configured in the production system. The gotcha is the “similar hardware” requirement. This often requires the same CPU version, BIOS, and I/O configuration to assure the recovery will be operational. In a heterogeneous server environment, duplicate servers need to be on-hand to execute a bare metal restoration for disaster recovery. As a result, IT disaster recovery for heterogeneous servers systems either sacrifice recovery time or requires the hardware investment be fully duplicated for a bare metal restoration to be successful.

Enter disaster recovery for private cloud computing. First, with all of the discussion about “cloud computing”, let me define what I mean by private cloud computing. Private Cloud computing is a virtualized server environment that is:

Designed for rapid server deployment - as with both public and private clouds, one of the key advantages of cloud computing is that servers can be turned up & spun down at the drop of a hat.

Dedicated - the hardware, data storage and network are dedicated to a single client or company and not shared between different users.

Secure - Because the network is dedicated to a single client, it is connected only to that client’s dedicated servers and storage.

Compliant - with the dedicated secure environment, PCI, HIPAA, and SOX compliance is easily achieved.

As opposed to public cloud computing paradigms, which are generally deployed as web servers or development systems, private cloud computing systems are preferred by mid and large size enterprises because they meet the security and compliance requirements of these larger organizations and their customers.

When production applications are loaded and running on a private cloud, they enjoy a couple of key attributes which dramatically redefine the approach to disaster recovery:

1) The servers are virtualized, thereby abstracting the operating system and applications from the hardware.

2) Typically (but not required) the cloud runs on a common set of hardware hosts – and the private cloud footprint can be expanded by simply adding an additional host.

3) Many larger private cloud implementations are running with a dedicated SAN and dedicated cloud controller. The virtualization in the private cloud provides the benefits of bare metal restoration without being tied to particular hardware. The virtual server can be backed up as a “snapshot” including the operating system, applications, system registry and data – and restored on another hardware host very quickly.

This opens up 4 options for disaster recovery, depending on the recovery time objective goal.

1) Offsite Backup - The simplest and fastest way to assure that the data is safe and offsite is to back up the servers to a second date center that is geographically distanced from the production site. If a disaster occurs, new hardware will need to be located to run the system on, which can extend the recovery time depending on the hardware availability at the time of disaster.

2) Dedicated Warm Site Disaster Recovery - This involves placing hardware servers at the offsite data center. If a disaster occurs, the backed up virtual servers can be quickly restored to the host platforms. One advantage to note here is that the hardware does not need to match the production hardware. The disaster recovery site can use a scaled down set of hardware to host a select number of virtual servers or run at a slower throughput than the production environment.

3) Shared Warm Site Disaster Recovery - In this case, the private cloud provider delivers the disaster recovery hardware at a separate data center and “shares” the hardware among a number of clients on a “first declared, first served” basis. Because most disaster recovery hardware sits idle and clients typically don’t experience a production disaster at the same time, the warm site servers can be offered at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated solution by sharing the platforms across customers.

4) Hot Site SAN-SAN Replication - Although more expensive than warm site disaster recovery, SAN-SAN replication between clouds at the production and disaster recovery sites provides the fastest recovery and lowest data latency between systems. Depending on the recovery objectives, the secondary SAN can be more cost effective in terms of the amount and type of storage, and the number and size of physical hardware servers can also be scaled back to accommodate a lower performance solution in case of a disaster.

Conclusion: An often overlooked benefit of private cloud computing is how it changes the IT disaster recovery game. Once applications are in production in a private cloud, disaster recovery across data centers can be done at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional heterogeneous systems, and deliver much faster recovery times.

Mike Klein is the President and Chief Operating Officer at Online Tech, a leading managed data center operator in the Midwest. Online Tech offers a full range of colocation, managed server and private cloud hosting in their SAS-70 secure and reliable multi-tenant data centers across the Midwest. Visit http://www.onlinetech.com/ for more information.

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When you have data on your computer, you most likely have it all saved so that you can keep it long term. Many run into the problem of having a failing hard drive and losing their data which can be a disaster. Below we will discuss what you can do that will help you properly back up your computer data so that this does not happen to you.

The best thing that you can do is to clone your hard drive. What this means is that you are taking the data on your drive exactly as it is and putting it onto another external hard drive. If anything happens to your drive, you can simply buy a new hard drive and copy everything back over to have your computer working exactly as it did before.

Use flash drives to backup your most important files to have them in a safe place. You might have the cloned backup, but doing this additional step is good because it ensures you have an additional copy of the files that mean the most to you.

Use some online backup services. Many of these are about $5 a month to use. What they do is sync with your computer and backup the folders you tell it to. The advantage of this is that you have a backup that is in a location other than your home. If you have a home fire for example that destroys everything, your data is still safe on these servers.

Download all your emails from online accounts. These can be hacked at times which means you lose your data. If you download and save them, they are backed up.

Get the data from your cloud services. You might be using online documents. You need to download these and keep them backed up in case anything happens to the service.

Whatever your plan is, you need to start right now because you never know when your drives will fail.

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Data recovery, in simple words, is a procedure of recovering data from storage media which, for some reason, is no longer accessible by usual methods. There are always files, that are too important to be lost and their damage could lead to serious problems. However, no matter how careful someone is, losing information is a possibility if the system comes across logical errors or wrong commands. Viral attack is another common cause of data loss.

Genuine companies offering recovery services are competent in fixing and recovering a loss by physical or logical means. Usually, the services comprise of recovery from DTs, the HDDs, IPODs, Laptops, USB Sticks, Floppies, Digital Camera Media, and other kinds of storage media.

Qualities Of A Good Data Recovery Company

There is a huge quantity of data which is considered to be highly important and may cause tremendous harm if lost. Most businesses also possess confidential information which is not to be seen by unauthorized persons. In such situations, confidence is very important. The protection of the recovered data from leak is mandatory and needs to be ensured by the company hired for the recovery. Additionally, the company should also be approved by the competent authorities. Apart from this, the company should be alert and should be able to tackle immediate situations on a 24-hour basis.

An officially approved specialist should be contacted, particularly if the device is within the guarantee period. Recovering data is a difficult job and necessitates extremely competent engineers to take care of the issue. Highly qualified individuals are a very important part of being able to retain data on hard drives.

The specialists offering a service like this have had proper training in the field. They undergo practical training to be able to proficiently handle data loss due to different causes. These qualified professionals are quick at figuring out the root of the problem, recover data and offer correct advice to the customer for preventing such a thing from happening again. Most approved specialists work hand in hand with computer manufacturers just to be aware of the kind of hardware that is used in various different devices. This makes their work relatively easy.

Almost all of the recovery procedures can be handled within two days time, however in some circumstances the procedure may take more than 48 hours.

Data recovery is an area of expertise and very rightly so due to the fact that several companies and people can experience huge losses if they end up losing their data (with no backup) due to some accident.

Being an expert in the data recovery field requires investing both in equipment (class 100 clean room) and in study. This is the reason why getting data recovered costs good money. Therefore, it’s advisable to stay away from companies that lack in proper equipment, and expertise. If an individual leaves a disk with a bunch of amateurs s/he is likely to lose the disk data forever and incur huge losses too.

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