Disaster Recovery Journal

As you know the more resources and information you have easily accessible, the easier it is to make smart, educated and informed decisions. Articles, research studies and case studies do go a long way in providing this information but sometimes you just need to see the plain and simple details.

This is where the DRJ Business Continuity Glossary comes in very handy. Our comprehensive and recently updated glossary gives you all of the tools and knowledge you need to better research, analyze and understand the business continuity space.

When keeping pace with growing data, a major concern for IT organizations, in terms of both storage and data protection is how the data protection solution will handle the growth.

IT organizations can drive up the cost of storage unnecessarily by treating all data the same and storing it all on the same media. Let’s face the fact: my resume is not as important as the payroll database or even the email database. So, why are you using the same storage policy for both?

Stop using one policy to rule all of your data. It might be simple, but it is killing your bottom line. When looking for a data protection solution, find one that allows you to use policies to treat data differently.

When keeping pace with growing data, a major concern for IT organizations, in terms of both storage and data protection is how the data protection solution will handle the growth.

If your business has grown its capacity by 40-60 percent in each of the past three years, and it now supports billions of data objects, you need a solution that grows with you. This growing of capacity may be outpacing your data protection solution and you may need to find a way to scale your protection.

Do you have different products to protect different types of data or different systems? If so, you need to start thinking about standardizing on a single product.  Think of all the time, training and resources you would save.

Can two of the same things have two different prices? Heck yes! Not only can they have different prices, but they can also be dramatically different. 

In the last few years, data protection solution providers have started to offer something besides “core-” or “server-” based. When buying software you need to consider all the options. One of the new options is capacity. 

By Rob Giffin, Avalution Consulting
Originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

Have you ever recommended additional redundancy for a process, department, or facility, only to be told that your organization couldn't afford it or have the project repeatedly delayed until next year? I have. It’s pretty common in our profession. 

Andy Osborne's blog from last week was truly timely: I've just been assigned a new task by my boss: Take a recovery management plan done for one company site, and sinter it down into a suitable "template" for other "small" company sites.  The task has already shown indications of Andy's experience: the work done by predecessors causing more work.  It's not that wrong things were written, but the document doesn't "flow" like a plan should.  I beieve a "plan" is like a recipe, only longer and without the rewarding aroma to savor at the end.  ;-)

Of the many kinds of plans I've seen over my years in this profession, few really read like a recipe, rather more like a cross between a dictionary with a mixture of random essays.  No flow.  But this time, I feel much better about the prospects, because the plan I'm to use as the starting point has, on one of the early pages after the Table of Contents, a FLOW CHART!!!  It has been my contention since my earliest months in this business, that recovery is a process, meaning it must flow - start at Square One and start marching until you're done.

Perhaps, if you've found yourslef feeling like your plan lacks something, maybe it needs some improvement in its flow.  Developing recovery plans can't (easily) effect a timely recovery without flow, because no matter how many people you throw at the disruption, the lack of flow will have them bumping into one another.

The emergence of the data center began in the 1990s, when companies began installing servers on their premises, replacing clunky and outdated mainframes. As technology improved, these spaces moved to off-site facilities with more dedicated resources. Today’s data centers are impressively sized, with countless premium features. In fact, the world’s largest data center—located in Las Vegas, Nevada—covers over nine acres of data real estate!

A traditional data center is an industrial building in which space is provided for server infrastructure, along with power resources, cooling systems, cabling, natural disaster suppression technology, and the most up to date security measures. To maintain cost efficiency, data centers are normally built where overhead costs such as electricity and real estate are low, but still have the ability to maintain an adequate staff. It is important to note that traditional data centers can be expensive to build in terms of monetary value and time; this cost is likely handed down to the customers down the road.

It is not all about data deduplication! Many data protection products and providers talk about data deduplication as if it will save the world. In fact, data deduplication is only a small part of the solution. What we need to be talking about is across the board data reduction.

Data reduction technologies are the first line of defense against rapidly expanding data volumes and costs. STORServer provides built-in data reduction technologies, such as progressive-incremental backup, data deduplication and data compression, enabling organizations to reduce backup storage capacity by as much as 95 percent.  STORServer also provides advanced tape management and efficient tape utilization capabilities, which can further reduce data storage capacity requirements.