Now I’m in (in Theater 1, which has wireless…) an IT disaster planning session. He’s starting off discussing BCDR (BC? – DR = Disaster Response) and his company’s (Starfire Technologies) experience in creating them.
To begin, he discussed the different types of disasters that could befall us (small, medium and large “never-happen” disasters). Medium disasters are the ones we should be planning and testing for. Smaller ones happen often enough (accidental email deletions, etc.) that we should be in practice. Medium disasters (server failures, etc) should be planned for. Large disasters include facility failures (fire engulfing the building) and have their own special needs.
BCP – Business Continuity Plans, not for DR but for daily business operations, requires process documentation, timelines for recovery events, ineffective training, etc. BC vs. DR – frequency & scope differences, can be complimenting solutions.
BCDR Plan – important characteristics
- Skill assumptions and expectations
- Automation of processes
- Application landscape review
- Sufficient infrastructure at recovery site
- Recovery data currency
- Identify external vendor dependencies
- Long-run planning
- Production-return planning
Next he talked about tiers of multi-site service. When I get the internal MRRL cloud up and running, we’ll be on Tier 4 – Dual Active Sites with all the data being shared among all locations.
The data – get rid of classic, aged backup methodologies for unified solutions (backup/restore, archive/retrieve, space management)
The Infrastructure – Storage; centralized arrays, internal fault tolerance, remote mirroring. He recommends offloading backup processing from systems (again, something I’ll be doing more of when we go to our cloud backups)
Infrastructure – Technologies; remote sites, vendor cloud offerings, virtualization and deduplication (no mention of internal cloud offerings… other than maybe a mention of storage virtualization)
That’s as far as he got before his time was up and up next is lunch – some sort of buffet… I’ll post more after!
