Too many times I have seen customers fully thinking that they have their Disaster Recovery (DR) taken care of due to the fact that they have successfully been backing up their environment and have it on tape at the vaulting company.

 If you are one of these people raise your hand…

I’ll pause for a second while you ponder your response wondering why I just made that statement.

I’ll ask a few other questions now:

    Do you have a disaster recovery plan?

    Have you tested your disaster recovery plan?

    Have you tested a server recovery?

    Where are you going to perform DR?

    Who is going to be available to perform the DR?

    What level of expertise is going to be required to get things rolling again?

    What kind of hardware is going to be readily available for DR?

    Do you have a copy of all installed media at the vaulting company?

    Is there a written DR plan or is it all in someone’s head?

    Are you required to maintain data by law?

    How long can you be down with server X before it starts to impact company function?

    How long can server group Y be down before it impacts the company’s bottom line? 

Now are you ready for a Disaster?

My next question would be what do you consider a disaster (DISASTER)? Is it the CEO deleted a file and we need it back now, or is it the datacenter just flooded and ruined all my servers. Either way it is a disaster in someone’s life and you need to be prepared to handle it and know the amount of time and expense it is going to cost you in manpower and cold hard cash in these times of doing more with a lot less. 

I’ll ask another couple of questions:

    Have you ever stated “we never need to do restores” or “we have not needed to restore a file in 2 years, so our backups are not critical”?

    Have the number of servers and the amount of data being backed up exploded in the past couple of years?

    Have you been faced with the need to continuously buy more tapes?

    Do you need to expand your tape solution so that your backups fit within the backup window?

Many companies these days are cutting back on one of the most critical, but often the most ignored pieces of their data center. Backup solutions are never the most glamorous part the infrastructure and almost always delegated to the junior member of the staff to manage. However the backup solution is always expected to work when needed, no matter how little time or money has been spent to ensure its success. The backup solution is always the recipient of everyone’s wrath when it doesn’t provide the data that “should have been there”. Often it is ignored or will be addressed later due to other “more pressing” issues. 

What would be the outcome if half as much attention was paid to your DR solution as your email server, that 1 SQL database, or the newest application on the market that makes coffee and writes its own code, would you be able to sleep easier each night?

Backups are not sexy, nor are they the focus of most IT departments. There is typically a small budget set aside for purchasing tapes, but no major changes are usually planned. Most IT staffs do not want to be tasked with owning the backup solution so that the finger is not pointed at them when all fails. Most of the time backups fail due to very few reasons; configuration issues of the software are the most common. The second most common reason is the data grew too large for the backup solution to handle.

Over the past couple of years many new solutions have been introduced to be the magic pill for all backup issues. Some companies proclaim that disk based backups are the only way to go ignoring the need to get at least a backup copy of the data offsite. Many boutique backup solutions have been offered to handle specific applications, these solutions though typically do not integrate easily into most enterprise backup solutions. Electronic vaulting of data at remote location has been discussed and made a reality over the last few years as long as the pockets of the company are deep, purchasing the needed network bandwidth. I could go on and on with the various offerings that are available.

Having assisted many companies in the past 20+ years with their backup solutions, companies usually stop spending money and quit implementing at the “backups are running” point. Most intend to get the rest done when they can afford to spend the resources both physical and financial. Often Disaster Recovery looks like an unnecessary expense from the CFO’s perspective because many think that the backup is all that is needed for DR.

In these days of tight budgets, it’s a good idea to include additional funds for DR in new projects since it is going to be called upon to handle the additional load. Few companies include the price of DR into the cost of the newest application but place additional requirements on their backup solution to protect it. Many companies are implementing BI or data warehousing projects both of which are extremely taxing on backup solutions without including the cost of upgrading the backup solution to handle the additional load in the project.

For me the best solution is the one that I can count on to be there with the data I need to recover when I request it. There are no substitutes to good planning, solid implementation, great documentation and repeated testing. Did I say repeated testing? Yep!

So what’s it going to be — restful sleep each night or maintaining your resume?