Monday, March 8th, 2010 - 11:29 am EST

Best Practices for Creating Disaster Recovery Plans for Your SMB

Posted by: Michelle Liro

Marathon’s Sr. Director of Products, Michael Bilancieri, recently answered some questions for Paul Mah of ITBusinessEdge.com regarding disaster recovery planning for small & medium businesses. A few of Michael’s answers are highlighted below. For the complete Q&A with Paul Mah, see the article here.

Mah: Any tips to help SMBs with constrained budgets get management’s approval to implement a DR program?
Bilancieri: This may be the most important part of the process. Without support from the senior management team, any DR plan will be hard to get off the ground. The key takeaway here is to translate the technical language into business terms.

Since DR is not primarily about the technology (it is about the business value), it is important to clearly express what downtime means in terms of revenue loss. By creating a chart, organized by each application, it is easy to clearly articulate how much revenue is lost across each application for a certain amount of time.

Mah: What are the best criteria for determining an optimal disaster recovery plan?
Bilancieri: First, you have to identify what it is you need to accomplish. This includes defining the recovery time objectives (RTO), which is the amount of time applications can be unavailable and recovery point objectives (RPO), which is the amount of data that can be lost when a recovery is required.

Keep in mind that these values will likely vary for each of your different applications. Implementing incorrect or incomplete solutions will result in wasted time and resources. Check with your users and clients to determine their requirements and any service level agreements that must be met.

Mah: Once you determine exactly what your needs, how do you select a plan?
Bilancieri: DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Seriously, there are so many different products that claim to be “DR” solutions, all approaching the problem from different angles, it can be very confusing to determine what actually does the job you are looking for it to perform. As you research different products to implement as part of your DR plan, be sure to ask specifically what their product does (copies just the data, takes data snapshots, captures complete images of the full system, etc.) and don’t be afraid to ask probing questions.

Many vendors make the same claims using the same terms but actually deliver very different results. If you are going to test these solutions in-house, which is recommended, try to do the test under similar conditions as your production environment, with similar system and application loads. Oftentimes, something works well in a test environment [where there is] no real processing happening, [but] fails to function adequately once deployed in the live production environment.

Mah: What would a DR plan look like for a company that may face natural disasters such as hurricanes and flooding?
Bilancieri: Since hurricanes and floods can cause severe damage that can result in long-term outages, it would be wise to implement a solution that protects your systems between locations that could not be affected by the same disaster. Ensure that the backup, or DR, site is planned for a location that can be readily accessible by your users and clients should the primary location be destroyed or otherwise inaccessible.

Marathon has a customer based in Georgia, The Sullivan Group, which implemented a disaster recovery plan just for this reason. The team decided to virtualize its data center with Citrix XenServer and implement Marathon's everRun VM solution to provide redundant virtual machines and synchronized mirroring of the entire system including network, applications and data. The Sullivan Group has a small IT staff but needs to be continuously available for their clients, so they needed a solution that was fully automated and offered simply implementation.

Their first step was to identify what their customers’ needs were - and they decided that they needed continuous protection. Second, the team determined exactly what they could afford, and the ROI they would see from implementing DR software. They already knew that they would constantly face the threat of storms, and that they needed their data to be backed up in a remote location. Finally, they determined exactly what solution their IT staff could support and decided exactly which business applications needed to be fully available.
 

 

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