Disaster Recovery
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In today's world, businesses are beginning to demand more from their
information systems. At the same time, the outer limit of technology is being
stretched to its limit to meet this demand. This in turn puts a greater
responsibility on the service Organisation, with the kind of daunting challenge
that it faces. A standard reactive service does not solve the situation with
solutions that it can present. To handle the situation, a more pro-active
approach should be adopted to run mission critical operation in today's
heterogeneous client/server networks.
If enterprise applications are not planned, taking into consideration all
aspects of data loss, this can cripple the enterprise all together. A system
downtime can cost the enterprise tens of thousands of dollars per minute, and
considering the days it takes for recovery, the loss could be well imagined.
Selecting, implementing and maintaining a data disaster recovery infrastructure
is a challenging job. If you find that it is making you taking chances, there
are such services available, who are professionally experienced, equipped with
high availability technology and proven best practices in such disaster
management.
To understand a recovery process, you should first understand your current
state, find out ways mitigating the risks, and last of all make a thorough plan
of recovery. You should use available tools to audit your infrastructure risks
and identify the danger in the process, prioritising the system restorations.
You shall need to make sure that you have with you the experience in the team,
looking after the aspect of data loss and disaster recovery and building up test
procedures for various disaster scenarios. The strategy of data or disaster
recovery should be where all such disasters are withstood with a well chalked
out plan. Such recovery operations are generally transferred to a remote service
centre or a facility to have the enterprise back on the rail, within the
recovery time objective and the objective targets.
For quite some years, professionals in Information and Technology took
disaster recovery to be the simple data recovery process of data files in case
of a computer or disk failure. Things are different today, with increasing
complexity in data handling and management, data losses are termed as disasters
to any enterprise functioning. Today's concept demands the constant availability
of the complex data and the notion of the data being made available within a
short period of time if there should be that unfortunate data loss or disaster.
Disaster is not just a serious loss of data, a dead hard drive or a power
loss, through human error or through malicious software. Instead, a disaster
could mean complete loss of communication through out the network, including
serious data losses, through-out the enterprise. To handle such situations
disaster recovery mandates are necessary that insist on instant recovery.
The impact on user is an important factor when the implementation of high
reliability disaster recovery system is being considered and implemented. In the
event of the initiation of a recovery process, the user should continue to be
connected to data, as the disaster recovery process takes over. The process of
disaster recovery should be totally transparent to the user. This is mostly with
the instance, when the source and the location of the data changes take place,
when the data disaster recovery process is in process. Therefore, user functions
should go on uninterrupted and such should be for both, the internal and
external users, for example, the users who are accessing the web-servers or your
VPN servers. The user function should be a continued process, without having to
shut down and restart the system.
There are some basic requirements needed to be considered, while you are
planning and designing data recovery procedures for your site. The general
guidelines of these requirements include the following:
You need to make sure that the sites have top level of support from the
hardware and software vendors.
For any mission critical applications, it is mandatory to use uninterrupted
power supply.
You need to set up a system, more appropriately a monitoring tool to
proactively detect problems. Your monitoring tool should be capable of event
monitoring and problem reporting, may be by sending a message to the email inbox
of your DBA. Additionally, the tool needs to monitor space usage and other
crucial aspects of data storage in a proactive manner.
Internet connectivity to your site is a necessity, for, in case of problems
your hardware, software vendors or any disaster recovery service agency can
remotely access your site and take necessary actions to monitor, diagnose and
repair the fault.
Each of your production sites should have the right hardware protection
system. This may include a hard disk mirroring device, implementation of a
back-up and recovery plan and stocking of enough spare parts to service your
hardware when necessary. RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) may be one
way to make continuous availability of your data, building up the capability of
fault tolerance implementation. However, the reliability of this fault tolerance
and improvement of data reliability will depend upon the RAID level used.
Your production site must be kept in such an environment which is hazard
free, and an environmental audit is done from time to time.
If you have very large database (VLDB), you should preferably maintain a test
bed and part of the data should be held in the test bed system. This would be
required when you are performing on-site testing and migration planning for
future database expansions.
Operation logs are ideal for such sites, where any kind of physical, design,
operational, environmental or scheduled task is logged each time they are
performed.
Storage business practices, leading to well formulated disaster recovery
planning, is gained from enterprise client implementation and operations. Data
recovery services bridge the gap between enterprises having mission critical
applications and the experience required for managing the necessity of data
recovery and disaster management processes. It has to be understood, that more
importantly, the process and people behind that process count more than the
technology, and disaster recovery service agencies help their clients in
identifying the areas of operational improvements, there-by aligning the
necessary technology with the requirement of the clients.
About the Author
I am a post graduate in Computer Science and have been working as the profit
center head of an international organisation. I look after 15 to 18 Oracle
database projects in Europe.
As a hobby I have been writing for the last 10+ years on various subject
matters. I have expertise in project report preparations, preparations of
technical tutoring documents, presentation preparations, writing of technical
articles, technical documentations abstracts of various books, copy writing,
reviews, articles, proof reading, news papers, magazines, presentations,
including SEO articles, etc., and also contributed in writing press releases and
various profiles. I have been writing for over 10 years. I have good experience
in writing papers, including transcriptions on various topics with extensive
research on the subject. I have also participated as a freelancer in online
sales and marketing. All my works are quality originals. I am generally involved
with few but large continued assignments in writing technical & non-technical
articles.
Prabir Sen, M.Sc Engg (London)
[email protected]
Over 20+ years in Oracle Applications with a large IT organisation in UK.
Hobby - Writing Articles
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Article Published/Sorted/Amended on Scopulus 2007-03-28 19:32:12 in Computer Articles
