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Blog: William McKnight

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Focus: Disaster Recovery

I remember the day, not many years ago, when data warehouse programs would annually undergo a disaster recovery plan test. This usually involved a weekend and usually involved some important revelations in terms of readiness! I've noticed in the past year that those tests are seldom done anymore. Not being a server expert, I assumed that there were some important new built-in capabilities to servers or more failover environments in place that removed the need for the exercise.

So, I began to make it a point to find out more and, while surely the servers have improved in this area and there are more failover arrangements in place, the primary reason data warehouse disaster recovery plans aren't done as much seems to be that the exercise is out-prioritized. This is not a great reason. Of course, averting a disaster is always a tough justification in light of the many clearly progressive things we like to do for our data warehouse environments.

But consider these simple things that form the basis of a sound disaster recovery plan, as given to me by a systems expert...

1. Have a backup strategy that you execute; usually this will mean daily backups of all production servers (my expert discouraged incremental backups) and hourly log backups
2. Diagram the network in detail with specifications and contact numbers (incidentally, CSI has capabilities here we call ClarityPath)
3. Prioritize systems and connections by acceptable downtime; this prioritizes the recovery effort focus
4. Build a recovery team including these roles - project leader, communication leader and technology experts who are on call 24 x 7
5. Test the plan (the premise of this blog entry) which includes testing those old tape drives to make sure they can read the old tapes still needed
6. Review the plan systemically once per month - make it a living document
7. Put up a secure website where status can be communicated in the event in-house systems are down and people are working from off-network computers

It's obviously difficult to evaluate these team members on the basis of something that will likely and hopefully never occur. Therefore, readiness metrics are more appropriate for the evaluation.

  Posted by William McKnight on November 15, 2005 1:21 PM |

Comments

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