Disaster Recovery

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Hi all just wondering if your in Network/Buissness Managament what sort of Disaster Recovery plans do you have? Do you follow any practises. I am doing alot of reading around the subject as I think its going to be an exam question for end of year exams in a few months so...Any info would be great.

In my job at the moment disaster recovery wize I simply back everything up to tape. My last I.T. job we did the same apart from the tapes were 10 times the size + we had alot more of them.

Thanks

 

Check out wiki [it's only basic info but worth a read].

Typically I've used a mixture of RAID, Tape backups and offsite tape storage. However like sparky said having the solutions in place isn't enought you should have regular DR tests to ensure the measures you have in place are workable and deliver the results you want.

On a more shallow note I have to say that DR tests are a good source of overtime too

 

Business Manager huh... hmmm... well ITIL tells me that service continuity management should be in place incase something major happens, be proactive, rather than reactive...

you need some type of plan to find out what impact this will have on users and other services, how this will affect running of the business and financially, have some type of backup service that you can put into place if this happens, even if its temporary, and of course, review these plans every 6 months or yearly, test the plan to actually make sure it actually works...

Quite a bit is within ITIL, however, whether you adopt these practises, is of course a different story...

Hope this helps...

 

All obvious stuff really, tape backing up, off site tapes etc.

How many users do you peeps look after? Have you used anything else apart from RAID/Tapes/Off site tapes? Like a complete backup site or replication, off site (storage apart from tapes) etc?

I am reading about how to formulate a disaster recovery plan for large coperations at the moment as it is nessessary I learn that for university. Alot of this theory though we tend to learn in University doesn't tend to be used though it seems? More so at a lower level I guess.

In my last job the manager would take the tape of site. I had to frequently restore data, emails, pst's etc using Veritas. When I was the only I.T. guy I would also take tape of site.

The schools I am at now, we have tiny little tapes which are backing up hardly anything. Unfortunately Ive only got two at one school. I plan to get some more soon (budget is pretty poor). The other school the I.T. Co-ordinator deals with the tapes.

Cheers

 

The contract I've just finished had several thousand users across more than 18 sites. Most of our storage was SAN based so it had build in fault tolerance and was split across our two data centers.

Each night we backed up the SAN storage to two large IBM tape systems using TSM. SAN storage based at site 1 was backed up to the tape system at site 2 and vice versa. The data centers also had generators in case of a powerfailure.

This provided basic fault tolerance to minimise general outages due to hardware failure. It also provided a secure off site backup and the potential to shift all company operations to a single data center in the event of a major disaster at one of the sites. We also had excellent third party hardware contracts for all our critical systems and a well laid out plan for restoring key systems based on the companies priorities.

It all comes down to the level of risk a company is willing to accept and how big their pockets are. Even though it sounds quite basic most disaster recovery plans revolve around these methods.

For most small companies duplicating or load balancing services and hardware across multiple sites isn't an option because of the high costs involved. The best they can do is secure their crucial data off site and ensure regular backups are taken. Should the worst happen and their office be destroyed the company would be unable to continue with it's day-to-day operations but the data would be safe and could slowly be restored as the site is re-build or re-located. However I doubt most small companies would survive this and they'd likely go under.

You will also have to consider the companies legal obligations under the data protection act and any special requirements [often law firms/public utility companies have additional obligations relating to the length of time data needs to be retained]. You may also need to consider Sarbanes-Oxley if the company is listed on the NY stock exchange.

 

We back up everything every night to virtual tapes and physical tapes. The tapes are then taken to a fireproofsafe in our nuclear bunker (guess when our building was built) backup are also stored offsite every other day. We also have a dr building at another company where we can set up if our building is destroyed.

 

We have our datacentre/office in the bunker - saves many things that way

Daily incremental and weekly full backup tapes, taken off site, stored at 2 other locations - important construction data like DHCP scopes etc are replicated to 4 other datacentres. In total about 1500 tapes per week.

 

Similar to John, the company I've just started working for is a NASDAQ traded one, so our DR is pretty damn tight. Almost all of our data - production and tier 2 anyway - is on our EqualLogic and NetApp SANs. We have two data centres - 200 miles apart - linked by a 32Mb VPN. At present we do log shipping of our Oracle DB - I've just got this working again after it being turned off for three weeks because the VPN link needed fine tuning - from one data centre to the other so that we have a hot standby in case the main production system fails. Our links are all fully redundnant, the SANs are both RAID50 and - apart from a few little things here and there - we don't need to do much backing up to tape. The only things that hit tape are Exchange and file servers.

 

Cheers for the info. : )