When implementing a DR plan, you must determine what types of internal and external threats your organisation is facing. You must also perform a business impact analysis to determine the data assests that are vital to your organisation and which data storage technologies, such as data deduplication and continuous data protection (CDP), will fit into a comprehensive DR plan.
To help you get started, read this four-part SearchStorage.co.UK series on disaster recovery for data storage managers. It offers a review of storage technologies that facilitate DR, keys to DR planning and design, outlines how storage virtualisation benefits disaster recovery, and more.
Disaster recovery for data storage environments
For effective disaster recovery, data storage managers must know the key elements of a DR plan and how to effectively leverage storage technologies to execute them. In this interview, SearchStorage.co.uk Bureau Chief Antony Adshead speaks with Simon Johnson of GlassHouse Technologies UK about defining a DR plan and the procedures storage managers need to include in it.
Listen to a podcast on disaster recovery in data storage environments.
Data asset inventory key to disaster recovery planning and design
What are the key elements of disaster recovery planning and design? While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, a data asset inventory that includes conducting a data classification project and assessing the potential risk for disaster from within your company will help you protect all of your data resources.
In broad terms, you need to determine the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for different parts of the business and put together an effective data protection plan to achieve this. You should start by performing a business impact analysis.
Continue reading about data asset inventory for disaster recovery planning.
Disaster recovery technology guide
Implementing an effective disaster recovery plan is predominantly about defining and introducing suitable processes and procedures, but technology plays a key role in enabling execution.
Here's a quick guide to the technologies that can help you establish DR provisioning, including archiving, virtual tape libraries (VTLs), CDP, data dedupe, failover and more.
Continue reading about storage technologies for disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery for virtual servers
The rise of virtualized x86 servers is changing the disaster recovery process, making it easier and more cost effective while requiring more careful planning. A traditional disaster recovery setup – with a second entirely physical environment – is expensive and often requires companies to prioritise the machines they most need to safeguard, leaving others exposed. Server virtualisation can help make disaster recovery easier by representing everything in logical terms and doing away with the need for a physical replica of your environment.
Continue reading about how storage virtualisation benefits disaster recovery.
This was first published in November 2009
