The Data Center: Using the Three P's of Disaster Recovery to Protect Your Data

DEPARTMENTS

HOME

TOP STORIES

DATA CENTER NEWS

EDITORIAL CALENDAR 08

EDITORIAL CALENDAR 09

ON THE WEB

PRINT EDITION

BZ MEDIA

AS OF 12/4/2008 1:41AM EST

The Data Center: Using the Three P's of Disaster Recovery to Protect Your Data
By John Rath

July 1, 2008 —

An EF5 tornado recently came within 25 miles of where I live. It was a major, historic event in the state and did some severe damage to small towns in its path. The sobering event made me think about two absolutely fundamental elements of a data center strategy—Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

While these are really business elements, they are often thought of and managed by the IT department. The company, however, needs to drive recovery strategies for both the business and technology. Depending on the size and budget of the company, there are many options and levels of protection and planning that can be provided.

DR is essentially the three P’s of getting back in business—policy, process and procedures. It involves every facet of the business and requires a lot of planning. The data center and facilities portion of the DR plan involves many things. Whether you look at it as tiers of data availability, or a cold site, warm site or hot site decision, it comes down to deciding how to best match a data center facility or facilities with your policies and plan.

A cold site is the cheapest route to go . It is a standby site that contains no equipment, but has the right electrical, environmental and telecommunication accommodations. A warm site contains all of your equipment and is ready to go live, but does not have live data and would require a brief setup period. A hot site is fully equipped and ready to take over operations at a moment’s notice, and often has frequently backed up or continuously replicated data.

If more than one disaster recovery site is feasible for your company and budget, a strategy could be to have a secondary data center within the same general region of the country as the primary, and then have a tertiary facility in a completely opposite or distant region of the country or the world. It may be more economically feasible to outsource the disaster recovery site to a co-location provider and configure the leased space to be cold, warm or hot.

Depending on strategy, budget or other criteria, building or leasing an actual facility might not be the best route for your DR plan. There are other means or methods of delivering infrastructure in the event of a disaster. The first one that comes to mind is something that has really caught my attention in the last year: containers. Sun initially made the container concept popular with Project Blackbox (now the Sun Modular Data Center).

The idea, and advantage, of replacing a cold site alternative is that it is quickly and easily deployed. The container is immediately populated with servers and storage, and it can then be delivered wherever you need it. Maybe your site selection for a disaster recovery site is any one of five places that you’ve selected, and then you decide after the disaster which one of the five sites is best suited to fit your needs.

Containers or purpose-built semis can also aid in the recovery of the data center that experienced the disaster. The Cisco NERV (Network Emergency Response Vehicle) is a mobile command and control center that delivers mobile-IP enabled solutions.

BCP is making the operations blueprint for staying in business after the disaster event. I read a newspaper headline about the tornado last week that stated that all government records were destroyed for one of the smaller towns. A business continuity plan is essentially the assessment of risk to an organization and what it can do to minimize the impact of those risks. Starting with a business impact assessment, you analyze and understand the mission-critical needs of the business. After the impact assessment, there is threat analysis, defining Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives, and several dozen other items after that.

The BCP is complex because your business is complex. The IT and data center portion of continuity planning is substantial, and many new technologies in the data center are helping the cause. Virtualization, data center automation and management software, and WAN optimization technologies are just a few of the industries that have greatly benefited due to an increase in BCP.

I heard shortly after 9/11 that there were 25 large EMC storage devices in the World Trade Center towers. The person telling me this said that only half of those were replicated to another site outside of New York. Imagining terabytes or petabytes of data being destroyed is enough to kick start or refresh any BCP or DR plan. Terrorist threats, pandemic worries and natural disaster occurrences are on the rise… time to upgrade your plans.

John Rath is an independent consultant and blogger at Datacenterlinks.com. He can be reached at johnsr4@gmail.com.

Related Search Term(s): Backup & recovery, data centers

Share this link: http://sysmannews.com/link/32428

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK

MORE COLUMNS