Most users must have had one of those bad PC days, when
you arrive at work enthused to complete a task, only to end up
spending the day waiting for IT to fix your newly broken PC, or in
a small business often doing it yourself.
When this happens at the server level, many users are impacted,
and it can be expected to happen at the most inconvenient time,
such as the end of a month, quarter or year.
Most managers are aware of the reliance their business has on IT
and the impact of applications not being available, but although
they may not like to admit it, many have only crossed fingers as a
business continuity plan.
Basically they are hoping that the inevitable does not happen
any time soon, and this is especially likely to be true for small
and medium sized businesses (SMBs). There are a number of ways of
mitigating the risk of such server failure.
Mitigate against server failure
One is to have a second server on hot or cold stand-by. This is
expensive, at least doubling the cost of the initial investment in
hardware and software, and unless the standby server is at a
separate location, it does not protect against fire and flood.
A second is to engage a managed service provider (MSP) to host
and manage servers; they then take on the task of providing a given
level of availability.
For those with existing in-house systems, using an MSP might be
a future consideration, but may not be practical for providing a
business continuity plan in the short term.
And, anyway, MSPs are not immune from hardware failure, although
they are more likely to spot emerging problems before they happen
and to have the spare parts at hand to get systems up and running
again quickly.
A third way is to use a service offered by a new company called
Plan B Disaster Recovery
(Plan B DR). It can put server level disaster recovery in place
almost overnight.
Plan B DR does just what it says on the box: for a fee of about
£180 per month per server it will keep images of your servers
off-site at its datacentre ready to fire up if a disaster should
happen.
The process is straightforward. Once you have signed up Plan B
DR sends you an appliance which you plug into your network. A one
time password allows you to browse to the appliance and identify
target servers to which the appliance downloads an agent.
Outwardly the appliance can only communicate with Plan B DR,
which uses it to create daily images of your servers and storage
volumes associated with them.
Obviously this means you may lose up to 24 hours worth of data
depending on when your server fails, but that is no different to
the situation with normal daily backups. Basic server
configurations do not change that often, but can be frustratingly
hard to rebuild if no record has been kept of how that server had
been built, possibly a number of years back.
Plan B DR allows, and recommends, that its service is tested on
a regular basis, so when it comes to the crunch and the service
needs to be invoked in anger there are no hiccups. When this does
happen users are simply redirected via a virtual private network
(VPN) link to a virtual server image running on Plan B DR's
infrastructure.
Virtual server
The provision of the
virtual server is covered by the subscription for a few weeks
until the old server is fixed or a new one found, at which point
the server image can be reloaded in its current state by Plan B DR.
The replacement could even be at the premises of an MSP if such a
disaster provokes a rethink about how IT is managed in the first
place.
Plan B DR has been up and running for four months. So far it
supports only Microsoft servers, although it has plans for Linux.
But as its target market is SMBs, where many servers are
Microsoft-based, it has had plenty of interest and it has already
signed up to 20 customers.
So far only one has required the service to be invoked for real
(although a test invocation of every server image is carried out on
a daily basis). Plan B DR sells the service direct or via resellers
and it is considering working with overseas partners that could set
up their own service with an agreement to use Plan B DR's
appliance.
Does Plan B DR have a Plan B? Of course: its main infrastructure
is hosted by an MSP at a datacentre in Maidenhead UK. Its backup
systems are in its own offices in Theale near Reading.
If, at the back of your mind you know that your business is
vulnerable to a bad server day, maybe it is time to think about
this type of a service, rather than investing in a back-up
datacentre.