IT Scan

October 17, 2004
Survive unplanned downtime

Ian Masters

UNITED KINGDOM -- Whether a top 100 corporation or a fledgling SME, business data is the lifeblood of all organizations and second in importance only to the staff you employ. An increasing number of real-world threats, including virus attacks, power outages and natural disasters, as well as less publicized problems such as equipment failures, network interruptions, or simple human errors, all increase the likelihood that daily operations affecting business critical data will at be interrupted. As a result, it is vital that businesses mitigate their exposure to risk from data loss or corruption and, in particular, choose a practical and cost-effective path toward protecting critical information.

The challenge to business is to minimize the disruption that unplanned downtime may cause and have the capability to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. SMEs are at threat from the risk of business interruption. According to Gartner, 50 percent of SMEs would go out of business in three years if they could not retrieve their data in 24 hours. A number of reasons why SMEs are particularly at risk include, limited IT resources for back-up and recovery; critical data is all held on one server creating a single point of vulnerability; pressure to comply with regulations but limited funds to implement these requirements; and business disruptions quickly start to impact on cash flow, something that few SMEs can afford. Increasingly, there are practical steps that businesses of all sizes can take toward protecting critical data and recovering faster from unplanned downtime.

People, priorities and policies first
One of the first steps is to ensure that there is a single person within the organization who is designated as the data manager and tasked with overall responsibility for protecting the information in event of unplanned business downtime. The responsibilities should include, securing management buy-in, documenting processes, investigating, directing and testing backup options.

The data manager should work within a designated group to determine what constitutes the most important information to the business. He should consider the impact of relevant regulations and define critical business applications. In smaller businesses, this may mean narrowing the focus on one or two core applications where an inability to access key information can start to cost money, for example, e-commerce site, customer database or e-mail system.

Get the data out of building
It is vital that you have an offsite back-up system that is geographically distant to the main site so that it remains unaffected by any localized problems. Consider cost-effective ways to achieve this, such as setting up a PC back-up server in the home of your IT administrator that it is connected back to the main server by DSL or cable.

Calculate the costs of downtime
It is crucial to obtaining management buy-in that you estimate the potential cost of downtime and the financial impact of your employees, suppliers and customers being unable to access critical information. A simple formula that will enable you to estimate the financial impact is:

Productivity Impact + Revenue Impact = Downtime Estimate

Productivity impact can be calculated on the basis of the average employee salary or rate multiplied by the number of business hours the users would be impacted. Revenue impact can be calculated on the basis of the average monthly gross revenue for the critical application multiplied by the number of business hours that the application is affected. These are then added together to achieve the estimated cost of downtime.

While this formula is a step towards setting a data recovery budget, it can be refined further by establishing a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each application. The RTO is simply how quickly you need to have information restored after downtime, and the RPO is the goal for how much data you can afford to lose since your last backup. Once you are armed with the real costs of downtime and the required recovery objectives, you are in a far better position to agree a realistic data recovery and business interruption budget.

Think beyond tape to achieve recovery objective
SMEs are also likely to discover that traditional backup tapes will not be a sufficient recovery solution if your goal is to resume normal operations as quickly as possible with a minimum loss of data. Further, tapes are ineffective for organizations with multiple remote locations. While hardware-mirroring technology (that uses remote copy technology to provide synchronous mirroring between two sites) is a more effective solution, it is usually prohibitively expensive for SMEs to purchase and operate.

However, new technology using asynchronous software-based replication can provide an effective recovery solution for a fraction of the cost of synchronous mirroring. It works by replicating only the bytes that are actually changed by each write (not the entire block of information or the whole file), resulting in a lower load on the production servers, faster updates, and the ability to send replication updates across low-bandwidth Internet networks.

Asynchronous software solutions are an ideal data recovery answer for SMEs and bring the added advantages of:

• Providing a near real-time copy of the data on another server without straining your production servers or network
• Costing less than synchronous replications hardware and much easier to manage
• Working over a lower bandwidth with effective backup of your remote or branch locations

Asynchronous replication technology is used to underpin NSI Software's Double-Take, which is available in the UK exclusively through Sunbelt Software. The solution is one of the most popular choices for SMEs seeking continuous data protection and rapid disaster recovery.

Make it easy for users to restore themselves
While most SMEs cannot afford to have a dedicated IT administrator to respond to requests to restore individual files, it can take many hours to retrieve and mount a tape, and recover the files, solutions such as Microsoft's Window Storage Server 2003 can be configured to take a snapshot of the data on a server twice a day, for example. Should a user delete or make undesirable changes to a document, they can simply select the file from any desired snapshot.

Make sure you really can restore in different situations
Finally, it is important to ensure that you have thought through how you would restore your critical applications, either locally or at a different location. Consider whether you have (or can quickly get) all the components you would need to recover, the specific steps you would need to take to restore a failed server and what you would do if you had to move staff and operations to an alternate set of servers at another location.

In the past, small businesses have been out in the cold as far as practical solutions to mitigating their exposure to data vulnerabilities was concerned, but nowadays this can no longer be said. There are many new software solutions that can significantly reduce your company's downtime risks, while maintaining a flexible, replication solution with speed and ease of recovery that works over long distances.

Contact:
Sunbelt System Software
www.sunbelt-software.com

(Sunbelt Systems were an exhibitor at Storage Expo, the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage. Now in its 4th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London. www.storage-expo.com).