Computer Room Outage

[Niffer]

Hello,

I am comparing the disaster recovery services among several companies.

What recovery services (options) do you provide if a computer room with 4 to 6 servers, one Nortel telephone and network gears broke down by fire? Do you provide trailer (mobile recovery)?

Please let me know and thanks very much,

Jennifer Ye

[A. Clay Stephenson]

A common mechanism to deal with disasters of this nature is to contract with a Diasater Recovery/Business Continuity Company such as SunGard. They can provide a mobile onsite data center or you can go to one of their recovery sites. Typically, you are allowed one "free" DR test at one of their sites per year as part of your contract.

[Wouter Jagers · Accepted solution]

If your scenario includes a full-blown fire in the computer room, you will need another location to recover your critical services: Your networking hardware is down, your power circuits are gone, and especially the great amount of dust, smoke and related particles in the air would destroy any new hardware you bring in in no-time.

You will probably need to 'branch' your scenario to know what you need. For example:

- 'local' computer room fire: recover to 2nd computer room (if available) or another room which can be 'prepared' for temporary housing of your machines, if possible. (Since you have relatively few machines, this could be quite a cost saver)

- if no decent in-house recovery location is available (or can be prepared) but the rest of your site is ok, having a trailer for recovery is very useful (check the details, though.. for example: do you need to supply a live power cord to the trailer and is this physically possible ?)

- if your whole site is affected by the fire, you could even need to relocate your recovery to an external site (because you don't have anything left to connect the machines to).

Disaster recovery planning is a game of asking tough questions to management ;-)
Find out which scenarios should be covered and check for pricing accordingly..

Good luck with the planning; I'll help hoping you'll never need them :-)

Cheers

[Ken wanderer]

Hello,

We keep a recovery server off site.
It has the tape unit to restore the back ups and restore the data. This would be the main App server.

I also have an old server(Utility) we just replaced at my house which has the (old but not too old) AV, Tape and other software it could run. We replaced it before it died, and could still run and only needs to have the software updated (downloaded).

Half our systems do job costing so these two could function till we replace the lost units and we would just cut back if needed till then.

[Ashly A K]

hi!

What we do is provide NOC to different customers. So, when ever there is an outage, I wrote a .VBS script and given to the on-site engineers. Once the DR is declared, the on-site people can run the tool and make sure that the links and routers are up/down.

We take back up on a DLT (with all database and other important data) and move to off-site. Once the off-site is active, the out put of the .VBS script is processed and uploaded to our system.

Hope this helps.

-Ashly

[Ken wanderer]

Hello,

The important thing when designing a recovery plan is to make sure you have routine testing as a part of the operation. Any pitfalls will be discovered along the way.

We test monthly to avoid any surprises.
I can tell you that our system works, and is not just an "on paper" concept.

Good Luck

[Chuck Ciesinski]

jennifer,

Just to add my 3 cents to the discussion, at whateever DR site you select, you'll need to make sure that the staff is familiar with you O/S, you have documented recovery proceedures, a contact list of key interfaces, copies of you licensing agreements, a copy of your businesses key customer lists for contcting once you are back on the air. Above all, document what goes right and wrong during each test. DR is an process and I know of no one who got it rigth the first time!

Chuck Ciesinski

[Ashly A K]

We have two kind of setup. One for major outages, which last or may last more than 4 hrs and the other is any outage less than 4 hrs. We are running a NOC which takes care of customers WAN and Servers. If the outage is limited, then we have a tool, which can be run by the customer or by our on-site engineers. This tool will capture the events and performance reading, and when the outage is over, they send the output of the tool, which can be uploaded to our DB.

We use this, when there is a major change in our environment.

In the case of a major outage, when the city is down or our office building is down, then we have a small setup(with very less number of servers) in one of our branch, which is more than 1000 KM away from this place. Some of our staffs at that branch is trained to use this setup. They are normally working in other projects. Once the DR is declared, these people will be pulled out of the current project and they work with this. We have ISDN connection from this DR site to all the customer location and monitoring and management will happen thru this link. The DB on the DR Site is updated once in 5 days. And peoples skill will be tested once in 2 months in rotation basics, which make sure that there are minimum 4 people, who is aware of the latest setup and configurations. And we need just 2 people to run the DR site, since most of the tasks are automated.

Hope this helps.

-Ashly