RenovoData Weekly Articles

 Before employing a remote backup company to provide offsite data backup services, make sure they host virtualization technologies for disaster recovery, which brings several benefits for small and medium businesses (SMBs).  Among the advantages of virtualization are cost savings and flexibility in the installation of a disaster recovery solution.  Put in a more simple way:  virtualization can reduce the amount of hardware required at a disaster recovery site and simplify recovery operations.  Moreover, virtual machines are independent of the physical hardware they are running on and are completely autonomous.

Virtualized disaster recovery solutions are based on replication and failover and often require a one-to-one pairing of production systems with disaster recovery operations.  Due to inoperable issues with some server-based applications and the complexity of managing such a configuration, it is often not recommended or not possible to failover multiple physical workloads to a single operating system instance running on standard server hardware.  As a result, organizations usually must purchase enough hardware for the disaster recovery site to handle production capacity or make sacrifices by choosing not to protect certain systems and applications. 

By leveraging virtual systems as secondary servers in a standard replication and failover scenario, each virtual machine is its own self-contained, unmodified server image.  These virtual machines can be operated simultaneously on a single piece of hardware, allowing many physical production servers to be protected in a disaster recovery facility.  Since each virtual machine is self-supporting and workloads do not need to be consolidated, managing applications and services during the recovery process is no more difficult than managing them in production.

Generally speaking, a remote backup service provider which hosts a virtualized infrastructure delivers practical solutions for preventing and minimizing downtime by making effective disaster recovery simple and reliable.  Virtualized solutions give SMBs the ability to:

• Build recovery infrastructure using existing servers, rather than installing identical duplicate servers for recovery.

• Cut operational costs related to power, cooling and infrastructure management.

• Do away with dependencies of recovery plans on physical server hardware.

• Eliminate planned downtime or service interruption for many types of maintenance by migrating running workloads to other servers.

• Make rapid disaster recovery attainable, rather than relying on time-consuming restoration from tape or disk backups.

• Extend disaster recovery protection to all critical systems.

• Increase availability across all applications independent of OS and hardware used.

• Minimize outages and unplanned downtime.

• Enable realistic, frequent tests of recovery plans without the cost and complexity of traditional disaster recovery testing.

Fact:  The Underwriting Guide for Insurers by A.M. Best found that only 6% of midsized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive; 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years of the disaster.

Today, we are inundated with news of how the unstable economy is affecting businesses all over; from the subprime mortgage crisis to a prolonged global recession.  This has placed disaster recovery spending in the cost category of a mere luxury expense, causing cash and resources to be diverted away from disaster recovery planning as organizations focuses on survival.  Some businesses may allow their disaster recovery contracts to remain idle and business continuity activities to be cancelled or postponed.  Although these actions all save money for the business initially, they do away with cautiously planned defenses, leaving the potential for vulnerabilities such as theft, fraud and equipment failure to be heightened by the recession.

Many businesses are under the misguided assumption that making less money means there is a need to spend less on disaster recovery.   However, this is actually where the emphasis on IT security spending should be placed; as businesses are less likely to bounce back in the event of a financial crisis.  Neglecting this area can have detrimental consequences for businesses of all types.  Disaster recovery should be considered an essential methodology for ensuring business continuity and survival in these tumultuous times.  A comprehensive disaster recovery plan is critical now more than ever.

This is especially important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) where streamlining and cutting back on expenses are inherent in business operations.  However, SMB owners must take into account that without any disaster recovery plan in place, they are at risk of losing revenue that could perpetuate their demise.  Major components that should not be overlooked are data loss prevention and continuous access to mission-critical data.

Disaster recovery planning is like car insurance:  you hope you never get into an accident or have your car stolen or vandalized.  However, if you fall victim to any of these scenarios, the insurance is priceless.  Likewise, no company should go without risk planning and safeguarding their IT resources through some sort of disaster recovery plan.  It makes good business sense to plan for the worst to ensure your business maintains operations in the event of a disaster.  Storing data at a secure offsite backup and disaster recovery location that is far away from facilities where your business primary operates is the best place to begin. 

Fact:  It has been predicted that the number of people affected by data loss is expected to increase this year.  KPMG's Data Loss Barometer stated that the global figure could increase to 190 million in 2009; a 98 million increase of those affected in 2008.  Malcolm Marhsall, partner at KPMG, explained that companies are set to become more vulnerable due to budget constraints brought on by the credit crunch.   KPMG's previous Data Loss Barometer found that half of the reported incidents were caused by internal sources, while 25% were the result of computer theft.

Today hasn’t been one of your best at the office…your SQL data is corrupt and you have to restore from a tape backup.  As if things weren’t bad enough, tape backups can take many hours - if not days to HOPEFULLY recover your data!  Let’s say that your SQL restored, but it’s the version of the last tape backup! Now your organization has to recreate the lost data that was not covered from the last full backup.  The ripple effects can impact the entire organization.  To add insult to injury, the data loss could result in compliance violations and heavy fines.  Now you are trying to figure out how to break this to your manager who needs critical information housed on the server prior to a client meeting in an hour!  

With this scenario, it would be safe to say tape-based solutions are not your safest method of preventing costly SQL data loss and application downtime.  The most reliable solution would be one that provides offsite disaster recovery while enabling continuous, on-demand access the moment a disaster happens – with minimal loss of data or productivity. 

When the SQL Server goes down, profits follow.  Ensure business continuity and rapid disaster recovery by avoiding these common SQL Server backup and recovery mistakes:

Mistake:  Writing backups directly to tape. 

Solution:  Use an offsite backup service provider to enable you to immediately identify where to find the file when you need it.  Doing so will make the recovery process faster and more reliable.  The virtualized infrastructure of an offsite solution has the capacity to identify the exact point the restoration needs to take place.

Mistake:  Failing to test backups.  

Solution:  It’s important to test your full, differential and transactional log backups on a standby or developmental server at least once a month.  Although it’s not necessary to test all backups that you create, you should at least go through the testing cycle for a full recovery just to become familiar with the process.   

Mistake:  Failing to check success of backups.

Solution:  Check your scheduled jobs every day to ensure they are successfully completed.  In the midst of doing so, observe the length of time the job took to finish and make sure everything is running according to baseline, and completed within the backup window.

Mistake:  Writing backups to the same disks as data files. 

Solution:  Create your backup files on a separate disk to avoid the chance of losing both your data and backup files.  The best option would be to hire an offsite backup service and disaster recovery company to backup your files on a virtualized server in the event of a complete server failure within your organization. 

Share some of your stories and lessons learned on backing up your data in the comments section below.  Also, be sure to download RenovoData’s SQL whitepaper. 

Fact:  According to the National Computer Security Association, without adequate backup it takes:

• 19 days and $17,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost sales/marketing data
• 21 days and $19,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost accounting data;
• 42 days and $98,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost engineering data.