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September 8,
2005
Volume 1, Number
9 |
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In
This Issue · Migration From NetWare Offering ·
ZAG Technical Services, Inc. ·
Citrix
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Technology Report:
Disaster Recovery
The events that have occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina are horrifying. The human toll of the disaster is beyond belief. While not to minimize the toll on lives that this disaster has brought; as business owners and IT professionals, the disaster should give us cause to reflect. One of the many lessons learned from the disaster should be how businesses handle their disaster recovery.
It is fairly obvious that many smaller companies cannot adequately plan for a disaster the scale of Katrina. After all, when an entire city is wiped out, there is almost no ability to recover in the short term. Electricity may be down for days, employees may no longer have houses to live in or a way to get to work even if there was a place to go.
Larger companies generally have the ability to pull through. Key to this ability is having more than one location. A company with two locations can ideally move the infrastructure and people to the second location and continue running.
However, it should be noted that there are disasters that even small businesses need to plan for in order to survive. Obviously, not every disaster is the scale of Katrina. Small businesses need to plan for relatively small disasters such as a fire that may destroy a server room. Let’s take a minute to review disaster recovery plans and your readiness for disasters.
Classic Disaster Recovery Plans
Classic disaster recovery plans have always been almost one dimensional. Servers were backed up to tape in the event that there was a hard failure on a server. In these cases, the servers were able to be rebuilt and the data restored and made accessible to the end users. This planning level saved the company from simple IT type disasters. These are disasters brought about by failures in hardware, viruses and the like.
A minor improvement over this has been to move the tapes off site. This covers the company in the event that there is a localized fire that affects the immediate server room. In this case, new equipment can be acquired, the tapes returned, and the data restored and made accessible to the end users. Several organizations offer the service of picking up the tapes on a scheduled routine and transporting them off site to a secured facility. Many times, they also offer the service of taking the tapes out of state to better secure them from loss.
The Internet Option
Another alternative to this is performing backups over the Internet to secure facilities out of state. There is a higher monthly cost to this alternative, as well as a limited amount of data that can be backed up during the normal backup window. A good yardstick is 1.5GB per hour over a T1 connection.
A True Disaster Recovery Plan Multi site organizations are able to take the next step in this disaster recovery. For a multi site company, the data can actually be recovered to the second site. Depending on the budget and the need for the recovery, these organizations may choose to have servers waiting as cold standbys to host these services once they are restored. It should be noted that one step in this process that is often overlooked is how users will actually get to this new site in a disaster situation. Users at the main facility are no longer local to the servers, so they are not enjoying the 100mb speed access that their Local Area Network used to provide them. In fact, depending on the situation, the people may not even be able to come into the office to work, and may instead be working from home.The Citrix Answer
Citrix is an excellent answer to this need. Citrix allows users to access their data from wherever they are able to get Internet access. The employees are able to use the applications seamlessly, so that it appears to the user that the application is running locally on the desktop. Instead, it is, of course, running at a remote location.
How users are going to access their data cannot be overlooked in any true disaster recovery situation.
Disaster recovery is a topic that can literally be carried to the Nth degree. We have talked about some of the standard methods of disaster recovery. If you would like to discuss this topic in more detail, please feel free to contact us.
ZAG is pleased to have been asked to be an early adopter of the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool. This tool offers an excellent opportunity to review a corporation’s security at a high level. The tool does more than the classic IT security review. It looks at the security of an organization’s Infrastructure, Application, Operations and people.
ZAG is able to utilize the tool to give a clearer understanding on where an organization stands with respect to its security. Customers have found ZAG’s excellent core understanding of the security field to be key to delivering valid results.
Please contact us if you are interested in having your organization’s security reviewed.
Microsoft is offering excellent competitive upgrade offerings to assist companies that want to migrate off of Novell NetWare servers and onto state of the art Microsoft Windows Server 2003. ZAG has found many companies moving to Windows as a result of Novell’s push towards the unknown of Linux. Microsoft makes the transition easier by offering subsidies of $600 for organizations purchasing one Windows Server 2003 and 50 Client Access Licenses (CALs). Microsoft offers an additional $600 for every 50 CALs purchased. This offer is valid until September 30, 2005. Please contact us if you are looking at making the move to a stable, reliable Microsoft product offering. This email newsletter
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