The IT infrastructure could be defined as all relevant components for provision of an IT service: servers, storage, backup, networking, desktops, etc. This should be documented in a disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery can be viewed as part of a broader field known as Business Continuity Planning, including non IT-related aspects such as key personnel, buildings, electricity, crisis communication, etc.
Disasters can be classified as:
- natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquake, etc.
- man-made disasters, such as accidents, sabotage, viruses, intrusion, etc.
These are more common and can be either intentional or unintentional.
Disaster recovery solutions should be based on business requirements, not technical preferences.
Why?
Although large-scale disasters are what first spring to mind, application failures, system malfunctions, hacker attacks and human error are far more likely to interrupt operations.
To remain competitive in the market, uptime demands are stepped up. Some examples:
- round-the-clock availability
- just-in-time delivery
- global supply chain
- fast, constant access to applications
- mandatory regulatory requirements
Resuming business operations quickly following a disruption is essential. Ideally, you would probably like to resume business from the point in time at which operations stopped functioning. To achieve this, the most up-to-date business data must be always available at a location safely separate from the disaster area.
When designing a disaster recovery solution, it is important to consider the
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements before choosing which method to use.
For further definitions, see the section on Backup/recovery
Disaster recovery planning
The first step of disaster recovery plan implementation is to create a clear understanding of what provides the highest level of value to the organisation, i.e. to link applications to their underlying business processes. Based upon this data, organisations can determine the acceptable amount of downtime for each application.
Obviously, dependencies are also very important - priority becomes a technical issue. Various services such as directory services and backup/recovery applications take on higher priority and need to be restored before anything else can be restored.
Technical solutions
A variety of technical solutions can be implemented depending on requirements:
- Backup/recovery solutions
- Replication
- Clustering
Having disaster recovery capability will only be of any real use if the system is tested systematically and frequently, as continuous changes at a typical data centre often results in misconfigurations, missing connections, etc.
Proact
Defining and designing a disaster recovery solution is a complex task.
Proact has many years of experience of design, implementation and support of disaster recovery solutions. Proact represents the leading technologies in the storage industry and is able to assist customers on the basis of their business needs.