Business Advice

IT Disaster Recovery Planning

12/08/09

By Simon Kelson, MD, Atlanta Technology

No doubt, as a small business owner, the thought of a major incident or disaster occurring sends shivers up your spine. If your business was affected by a fire, flooding, or perhaps vital IT equipment was stolen, what impact would this have on your business and do you have a plan in place if such events were to happen?

It's likely that today's uncertain economic environment may make failure more likely, but business continuity planning with an emphasis on cash management lets people plan and act rationally, rather than...

...being frightened into investing in expensive in-house solutions. Let's review what Disaster Recovery (DR) options are available to small businesses;

1. Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
CDP is different from traditional backup in that you don't have to specify the point in time to which you would like to recover until you are ready to perform a restore.

Traditional backups can only restore data to the point at which the backup was taken. With CDP, there are no backup schedules. CDP appliances provide local continuous backup and also take transactionally consistent snapshots of servers, which are transmitted to an off-site disaster recovery site. In case of failure, an instance of the failing server is brought on-line, and users can access their applications and data from their designated workplaces over a secure network.

Data replication and communication between sites generally accounts for 30% of all recurring DR costs. Therefore, replication should be optimized to minimize bandwidth requirements and reduce the overall cost of DR. Good CDP appliances ensure that data changes are replicated at the smallest possible level of granularity, reducing bandwidth and associated storage costs.

CDP appliances often use compression and other bandwidth-saving techniques, replacing the need for general-purpose bandwidth-saving technologies. If... continued on page two >

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