Disaster Recovery Planning (DR)

Insurance salesmen will tell you that the sceptical are the most fervent converts, when a disaster happens. So it is with business data.

Businesses don’t realise that for a small investment in IT equipment and consultancy they can safeguard their most precious asset – the data stored on their servers. Perhaps we should take a step back and begin by making company directors aware that data, electronically stored, is the lifeblood of a company and if it is lost, it can spell the demise of the company.

Let’s put it this way, in the past, when Rendili have been brought in to resurrect a situation from data loss/disaster to a fully operational system, the company management concerned have always learned from that experience and implemented a full disaster recovery plan.
Now, rather than dealing with the aftermath, Rendili are promoting a preventative approach and in this case study we will be describing the DR plan for Femcare-Nikomed Ltd that was implemented recently.

Femcare-Nikomed Ltd

As part of the IT strategy, it was decided to upgrade both of the main two servers and additionally to commission a separate DR server that could be used as an immediate replacement in the event of the servers becoming inoperable for whatever reason.

Using the Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery suite and with the deployment of 6 USB disks (3 per server) we were able to keep the DR server completely up to date at an off-site location. The disks were rotated at regular intervals to ensure operational readiness.

Each time a new disk is brought to the DR site, a full recovery is run onto the DR server. The disks within the DR server have been arranged so that both live servers can be recreated, together with the use of VMware for the secondary live server.

A further refinement is a scheduled restore of tape data in the interim between disk swaps to bring the DR server right up to date.

Nikomed are delighted with the new setup as not only do they have peace of mind, but the system performance and reliability easily surpasses that of the previous configuration.

Rendili consultancy

Rendili have over 50 man years of experience in IT. We can survey your IT setup and make recommendations both for your current IT plan and a custom DR plan that addresses your full requirements. Our objectives in doing this can be simply stated as follows:

• To reduce downtime and therefore loss of revenue to an absolute minimum in the event of an unforeseen disaster.
• To plan for server replacement prior to system failure.
• To ensure that the most cost effective Disaster Recovery (DR) solution is provided.

The key question to answer is how long can you operate without access to company data?

Just when you thought it was safe to update your computer

There’s nothing quite so dispiriting as coming into work in the morning and finding that the huge service pack you applied the night before has reduced your PC to a catatonic state.

Of course you never bothered to read all the pre-deployment bumf about what pitfalls you might encounter or whether you had enough disk space (at least 15Gb in Vista SP1’s case) or whether your disk drive was free of errors.

So, out of laziness or boredom or both you’ve now spent three days getting back to a semblance of the system you had prior to committing your blind faith in Microsoft service packs.
Hmm, haven’t I been here before – Well yes, frequently.

Cynics and people who manage to use computers and programs as a tool for them, as opposed to the other way round, always wait until at least version 3 has been released. That way they are far less likely to get shafted by the corporation’s astonishing lack of testing prior to imposition on an unsuspecting public.

Those veterans of the microcomputer revolution will probably vaguely recall the very first version of Windows. It was the most amusement I’d ever had with a kludge GUI. As a simulator for a frozen system and taking a minimum of 15 minutes to actually load it was a winner. Once loaded, any attempt to actually do something resulted in the system crashing. No wonder computer users always prefer the devil they knew, in this case good old DOS.

My frequent visits, on behalf of the large corporation I worked for, to the old Microsoft headquarters at Bellevue in the early eighties to sort out the many problems with various purchased applications and programming languages illustrated the wide gap between what was sold and what was delivered. On one occasion, after finding the programmer responsible for one particularly obscure package, I was told “oh that man, it’s a pile of shit” and that, needless to say was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned.

But, I digress. During the three days system rebuild I was lucky that most of my data was saved on a network drive. I still had to complete all the finishing touches like reinstalling all my applications and rebuilding my favourites list and fonts – yes even IT experts slip up sometimes.
Perhaps as IT professionals we think it will never happen to us – well I’ve got news for you, it does.

Fruit growing season is already over!

As a company who offer a high level of customer service and support to our clients we are frequently faced with problems that have been caused by the clients themselves.

Of course it’s important to resolve problems but it is equally important to provide guidance and even leadership where IT matters are concerned. This may seem obvious but it is quite surprising how many support staff feel uncomfortable about offering strategic advice.

I am sure a lot of this boils down to bad experiences that clients have had in the past with computers and the software that runs on them. People not unnaturally want to use their computers to do what they want to do, when they want to do it, otherwise they argue what’s the point in having them. Reliability is key as is familiarity and a firm grasp of how it all works.

Unfortunately, understanding how your system works is not something that is a priority in business life. So what happens is that you get situations where a customer will order a new PC and insist that Windows 98 is installed, because they believe it to be secure and reliable, or a customer will purchase a popular brand of PDA, whose image is great but whose software and setup leave a lot to be desired.

Oh and I haven’t mentioned those people, like my sister who change their e-mail settings, so that they have an e-mail address they like and wonder why they never receive any mail. Or another time, when she deleted files without knowing what the files were. Hmm, think I’ll delete this NTOSKRNL.EXE file - it’s making my c drive look untidy.

Challenging user incorrect beliefs and perceptions needs to be done gently but firmly. Remember you’re the one that has to support the installed solution so make sure it’s reliable, easy to use and support and up to date. It is important to train your clients too. Make sure they understand the basics of their system and you’ll find your support burden diminishes and their customer satisfaction increases. A true win-win situation.

The juicy, rich fruit that tastes good and meets industry standards is always better than the slim, attractive one with no taste or content.