The south west and west of Ireland got pummelled last week and it has been continuing. We woke up on Friday to stories of how half of Cork was under water. It wasn’t helped by the ESB who had to open the gates at some of their water reservoirs which sent even more water down to the already at risk Cork city. We saw photos of submerged streets, cars and businesses.
This was a time when a plan was needed. Most businesses will have insurance. That covers the cost of lost stock, buildings and assets. But what about lost customers and revenue? No insurance will even come close to that. Even the smallest of businesses rely on computers now. They don’t do too well with high levels of water. I wonder what all those small, medium and large businesses were doing for that situation?
At work, one of the services we provide is secure online backup for operational and DR backup/recovery purposes. That covers desktops, laptops and servers. I’m not involved in that side of the business on a day-to-day basis but one of the engineers told me that we’ve already helped out a number of businesses who were hit by the floods. All they needed were alternative places to restore their data and away they went, keeping their business operational, even if at some limited capacity. They could maintain relationships with their customers instead of just going completely off the air.
What about those businesses that did the usual, “safe”, “trusted” backup? No backup is useful for DR if it isn’t stored in a secure and remote location. Tapes or disk arrays in your computer room that is neck deep in water won’t really do too much for saving the business.
Ah – but you’ve got a DR plan with live replication? Superb. Can I ask a quick question. Where is it? Is it on the same flood plain? Is it in the same power supply region? Two examples of organisations I’ve dealt with in the last 2 years come to mind. One was a organisation in Dublin. They wanted a DR solution where they could replicated all servers from their offices to a DR site or Site B. We went in as a hosting company offering a solution. (a) They were unwilling to share technical information, e.g. required specifications, so we couldn’t price anything and (b) they decided they wanted to use their second office as a DR site. Where was the second office? It was around the corner on the same flat area and probably in the same power supply region.
Then there was the organisation I met with in Limerick a few months ago. Their campus is split across the Shannon, the largest river in Ireland. On the good news front, one side is in the Limerick grid and the other is in the Clare grid. The bad news? The river Shannon is reportedly about to burst its banks with the forecasted rain coming into Ireland. That isn’t going to do this organisation much good considering the campus is literally on the river bank and the region is as flat as a pancake.
If you are doing DR then take the same approach as you should with tapes. Place the location as remote as you can afford with a different geographic area/profile. Make sure it’s on a different power grid and preferably with dedicated substation, diesel generators, etc.
You can do DR on the cheap. There are service like what our company offers for online backup. Alternatively, have a look at Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager solution: DPM2DPM4DR. Here you place DPM in your production site and it backs up to disk. You then either get dedicated/colo hosting, another thing our company does, and place an identical DPM installation there, maybe also with a tape library. That hosted DPM installation can backup the data store from the production DPM site, maintaining knowledge of its internals. Then it can optionally stream to tape for archive. There’s a cheap DR!
Alternatively, you can spend a fortune on host based replication (DoubleTake, etc), implement cross-site SAN’s (HP LeftHand or Compellent – requiring at least 100MB dedicated links) or do SAN controller based replication (HP EVA, XPS, EMC Clarion – all requiring dark fibre).