Data Center Checklist for Recovering From Disaster

Datacenter disaster recovery plan is an absolute necessity to protect a company’s investment in communications, information technology and all other sensitive and vital information of the organization. It needs to be scalable and flexible so that it can face the damage caused by a disaster. Every company should have a data centre checklist, along with the suggested actions to recover from a disaster easily.

Here’s a checklist for recovering from a disaster:

·         A Well-Written Plan that Evolves with the Company

In case of any damage caused to the local backup systems and servers, devise a well structured plan to fall back on. Put that plan in a safe place such as online lockbox service and update it regularly.

·         Emergency Power 

The implementation of an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) system on systems and critical servers is a must which will permit for the smooth switching over from primary (utility) power to an emergency power system during an event of power outage.

·         Elevate storage systems and server level 

Be careful about the location of the IT systems to prevent damage to critical servers from the fire department, floods and bursting of pipes. The storage systems and servers should be stationed above the street level and the areas where water can accumulate, such as the basement should be avoided. For additional protection, the rack critical systems should be placed high above the floor level in single storey facilities.

·         Embrace Geographic Diversity

The data of the company should be backed up at a distant location to protect it from a local disaster, such as fire, regional disaster like earthquake or flood or a disaster of a greater proportion like a hurricane. Consideration of redundant off-site backup storage should be done and should be checked to see whether the system could be restored to a completely different kind of hardware. This backup should be present in case the local hardware is unreachable or entirely damaged.

·         Have a Local Backup

A local backup copy is absolutely necessary if the primary data centre has power but loses the internet connectivity and there is a requirement to recover data from the server.

·         Include Disaster Recovery Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Conduct Training Drills

Recovering policies and SLAs should be incorporated in a disaster recovery plan to assure that data can be recovered any time in the most productive way. Regular disaster recovery drills should be conducted and the IT staff should be trained adequately through such drills to ensure effective recovery of data in time of need.

·         Identify a Minimum of Three Business Site Failover Locations

This would permit the recovery of remotely backed up data through Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) to the servers at the recovery site location and enable the critical business operations to continue even if the primary data centre is lost.

·         Emergency website for Real-time information

An offsite emergency website is mandatory to which all the employees of the organization should have access. Real-time information is communicated to the employees with the help of this site.

Click to Read More: DATA CENTER CHECKLIST FOR RECOVERING FROM A DISASTER

Conclusion

Careful consideration and assessment of the functions and risks involved in a data centre is vital while designing a data center    disaster recovery plan and with a well devised plan, damage to a data centre can be reduced considerably.

How a Bad Hosting Service Could Ruin Your Business

A good website plays a vital role in boosting sales revenue. A stylishly designed website with meaningful and resourceful content alone cannot augment sales. An entrepreneur fails to realize the contribution of a good hosting service provider. A bad hosting service provider can spell disaster for a business with their obsolete technology, equipments, inexperienced employees and poor customer care support. Thus, in order to save a business, the services of cloud hosting service providers should be deployed.

4 Reasons why you should avoid bad hosting service are: 

Slow Websites - Poor user experience

Slow websites are not only annoying, unprofessional and distrusted by experienced users, search engines like Google also consider the speed of the website as a criteria for ranking.  No wonder, the ace brands invest greatly in increasing the loading speed of their websites and making it as fast as 3 seconds. Poor hosting service providers employ cheap equipments to save money. These service providers lack advanced technologies and have inexperienced employees who are unable to resolve network issues. Hence, in order to make a business flourish and augment the sales revenue, the services of cloud hosting service providers should be used.

Down Time - Loss of revenue

A poor hosting service provider hires amateurs and invests in poor infrastructure to save money and so the service dished out by them is deplorable. A website could be down for hours or even days and downtime is considered to be loss of revenue which would ultimately be dreadful for a business. Only if website monitoring is done with an online tool, then it is realized that half the time it is not accessible and is down for considerable hours in a day. All these lead to a decline in sales revenue.

Poor security - Hacked Websites

Poor hosting service providers are the hub of phishing websites and poor scripts enable hackers to manipulate security codes and access vital information. By using the service of a bad hosting service provider, a businessman puts his business at risk. Cyber criminals could hack sensitive information related to his business and prove to be a major threat to his company. In order to save a business, the cloud hosting services should be used.

Bad Customer Support - Constant Headaches

Another drawback of poor hosting service providers is that they offer poor customer support. They lack professionalism and fail to offer the quality of service expected from them. In case any technical assistance is required from them, the only thing that one gets is unfriendly, unprofessional and hostile response.

Click to read More- 5 Ways a Bad Hosting Service Hurts Your Business

Conclusion

The services of a good hosting company should always be considered. It is worth that extra money shelled out. Buying the services of a cheap hosting service provider would mar the reputation and sales of business. Quality should be the prime factor to be considered in such cases. High-quality servers, dependable data centre, secure and reliable network, top-notch customer care support and a good automated infrastructure would be beneficial for any business. Ultimately a service provider, who can make a difference to a business and its sales, is all that should matter and this can be achieved with cloud hosting services.

5 Important Facts about High Availability Data Center Design

As the datacenters become more and more essential to enterprise applications, there’s a rise in the concerns about datacenter reliability and its availability. Redundancy is considered to be an important factor for infrastructure reliability by industry experts, but it’s not the only factor; what’s more important is the need to keep the design and actual requirements of enterprises in sync.  

Having redundancy more than is needed can lead to unnecessary expenditures obstructing the path to high reliability. So, it becomes imperative that missions and needs of companies are aligned with data center performance.

Here are some important facts affecting availability that must be kept in mind:

1.Increasing redundancy may notalways be the right thing to do

Actual reliability comes with the designing datacenter according to application needs and not by furthering infrastructure redundancy; as it doesn’t make a system more reliable. In fact, reliability lowers at a point when redundancy is increased greatly; and the reason for this is the enhanced system complexity and difficulty to manage it.

2.Tier IV costs 2X more than Tier II design

It isn’t any wise to just design and build the reliable infrastructure that would be affordable considering redundancy costs, it must be supporting the applications well too. There doesn’t lies much difference between Tier I & Tier II as is the case for Tier III and Tier IV. However, there’s huge difference in the way Tier II & Tier III are designed. That’s why Tier IV costs are nearly double compared to that of Tier II design.

3. 2(N+1) UPS Configurations aren’t any more reliable than 2N one

You would expect 2(N+1) generators to be more reliable than 2N UPS design but that’s not how it works in reality. They both have the same failure probability without much difference in operation. So, this is another example where redundancy is not directly proportional to the reliability.

4. 2N generator configuration is slightly reliable than the N+1

Between 2N and N+1 generator configurations, there’s considerable difference in observed availability. Failure probability difference is (1.5-4.41) % and 2.94% respectively. You don’t really need to go for prime rated generators instead if you want to meet Tier-IV standards as standby generator would suffice. Usually, Uptime demands generators to run even during maintenance that all the major generator manufacturers do provide.  

5. Generators do hit problems when run for longer time durations

In a lab research, it was discovered that 15 % emergency diesel generators failed after 8 hours of continuous operation; 1% failed after 24 hours; 5% failed after 0.5 hour; and 2% simply failed to start. So, the generator redundancy is crucial as the generators have tendency to fail. When they are run for longer period of hours, the generators hit a snag leading to its failure.

Conclusion

To sum up, reliability isn’t solely governed by redundancy factors and Uptime tier systems. Other important factors that come into play for high availability datacenter design are site age and location, building construction, equipments’ quality, commissioning process, operations and maintenance practices, personnel training and more. And not to forget, the concept of redundancy for reliability is somewhat related to the infrastructure design and not on the whole.