ProNet Computers have considerable experience of some of the risks that companies are exposed to in terms of Business Continuity and a Disaster Recovery (DR) planning. It is vital to have some form of Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity in place. This is imperative to protect your company’s reputation or indeed survival in the case of loss of ALL or most of your Data.
Image coming in to work one day to find that your Servers have disappeared (been stolen), been damaged, sabotaged by a disgruntled former employee or even destroyed in a fire. How would you continue your business all your Data was gone?
Invoices, tax and VAT records, customer contact lists, outstanding orders, stock control, payroll all gone. Then that day your best and most profitable customer cannot email you , so he telephones you, you have to admit that you have lost all his records. Will he feel comfortable and secure with you ? Can you risk losing his business? How can you bill anyone? Who has paid you and who has not? The VAT man calls?
Not a problem if you have planned for this catastrophe with ProNet Computers. Imagine you ring us and we restore your lost Data quickly and efficiently, you have survived and you are back in business. Well done.
ProNet would assist you to create a system that will allow the minimum amount of interruption in terms of computer system business continuity and maximum amount of DR for the best possible cost. It is generally our experience that these two criteria will work against each other, in terms of price. However, we will inspected your computer system and develop some plans for your consideration.
The two usual methods are;:
- Full standby server replacement using “bare metal restore” process.
- A file replicating server located at your site however not in the same location as your existing server.
Bare Metal Restore Method
This method uses specialist computer equipment to make incremental (only adds the changed files) snap shots of your servers on the fly during the course of the day and night. Should one of your servers become “unavailable” (Stolen/Go inoperative/Act of God). The system will be capable, with the aid of technical support, of recovering seamlessly to previous working state within 3 working hours.
In more simple terms, a total server backup is continually taken that can be restored on to a spare server within 3 hours.
This method is more aligned with a full DR plan and will require specialist computer hardware and additionally spare computer equipment for the process to function correctly.
“Bare Metal” refers to the fact that the spare server does not require any pre-configuration and this spare server does not even need to be from the same manufacture or have the same technical specification.
The figure below identifies how this process works, the email server with the red “X” has gone inoperable and the spare server is rebuilt from the NAS device in around 2 hours.
File Replication Method
This method is simpler, and less costly, than the Bare Metal Restore. Unfortunately should not be seen as a total solution.
This solution employs a second data server that is deployed in another building. This server is loaded with an operating system, compatible with existing servers. This second server is configured in fail over mode, so should the primary server fail this secondary server will “take over” from the primary one.
This method is more cost effective, per server, than the Bare Metal method. However if one was to “replicate” many servers in this method the hardware would become cost inhibitive.
The figure below shows how this method would work
