Disaster Recovery Basics

By Joe Day

Losing important data causes many problems but it helps to have a plan to recover it.

Can your company afford to lose its data? The obvious answer is no—no one’s going to admit that it’s acceptable to lose corporate information. And yet, many companies don’t take the necessary precautions to ensure it doesn’t happen.

It’s a well-known fact that backups are vital to the disaster recovery process. The majority of organizations understand the importance of backing up information as well as testing those backups.

Here are a few questions you must answer as you are planning your backup strategy:

• 1. Will you be backing up all or just part of your data?
• 2. How often will you back up?
• 3. Will you store your back-ups onsite or offsite?
• 4. If you store offsite, how do you plan to move the backups?
• 5. Are there special legal and regulatory requirements that you have to meet in your data back-ups?
• 6. What media will you be using for your backups (tape, disk, etc.) ?
• 7. How long will it take to fully recover?

Tape Backups

Tape systems are the primary methodology used to implement Disaster Recovery solutions. These systems take point-in-time copies of the organization’s data and commit them to removable media (i.e., the tapes), which the company can then store in a safe facility.

SAN

SANs today come in two flavors: Fibre Channel, and iSCSI or IP-based SANs. Fibre Channel is the most well-known type of SAN, but over the last couple of years, iSCSI-based SANs have started to hit the market in a big way, mainly due to their good performance and much lower cost versus Fibre Channel.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems connect directly to your network, but they do not generally provide block level communication with the host, making them unsuitable for most database and Exchange applications. A NAS system is really a very large file server running its own operating system and providing direct access to users.

Encryption

No backup protection strategy would be complete without encryption. For security purposes, it’s vital that you encrypt all information that leaves your facility. And if your current backup solution doesn’t support encryption, then it’s time to find a new backup solution.

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