How to partner for disaster recovery - Tape/Disk/Optical Storage

Computer Technology Review, April, 2003 by Jason Buffington

So, find the person who will feel the weight of a potential crisis (the sponsor). Then, help him understand how great that weight is (the business impact) and show him how easy it is to avoid that weight (the ROI).

Being a Partner

As a related point, if you truly wish to be your client's partner in this endeavor, then expect to be treated as a partner (as opposed to a self-serving vendor). This kind of project is not about your client wanting to do you a favor by purchasing some of your wares. He needs this protection. You are providing him a way to ensure that his business survives, while he is providing you a livelihood. It is a symbiotic or mutual relationship.

One way to test whether a client views this as a partnership is by the level of information that he is willing to share. If he truly believes he needs this protection, then he will want to share it--and will need to justify it. Because your client may not have participated in this level of business impact analysis before, he can use your expertise in understanding where to look to find the metrics. If he is sharing, then you are partners. if he is not sharing, or the process appears more like a job interview, then in some ways you may still be looked upon as a vendor trying to sell.

To balance out this idea of partnership," you should recognize that no matter how good your intentions--their business continuity plan is theirs. In the event of a crisis and if the plan works, they are heroes and you may get some credit, if the plan fails, they failed and you may also share some grief. But it is admittedly the client's survival at stake--unless, of course, you have provided some financial guarantees to the project (which is probably outside of the scope of this article).

New Technology?

Let's discuss technology. It is not an accident that this article spends time discussing the client relationship and the analysis of his environment. Really and truly, until then, no solution is appropriate. But now that we understand our client's needs, we must consider that there are alternative technologies that may be better suited to your customer's needs.

In the disaster recovery space, and particularly for Microsoft Windows environments, host-based software replication seems to satisfy a wide variety of customer needs. The alternatives to this technology often fall to both edges of the recovery spectrum (i.e., tape backup and/or synchronous hardware).

Tape backup, although relatively inexpensive, often takes too long to restore and (at the end of the restoration window) the data is usually days old. As an example, consider if a primary server failed at 4 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. Components could be expedited on Wednesday morning and if the restoration began in the afternoon, users would begin working by Thursday morning--with data as it existed on Monday night's backup. Tuesday's data would be lost. And Wednesday would have had limited productivity, at best.

If off-site tape couriers are used, Monday's tape might have been off-site, which adds an additional day before the restore could have begun. To imagine an even worse scenario, consider if the environment does a full backup only on weekends (and incrementals during the week). If something were wrong with that weekend's backup, the data loss and restore efforts would both reach back through the entire previous week.