Disaster Plan & Business Continuity Infrastructure
The key technology elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan (DRP/BCP) infrastructure are the primary data center, a remote site that duplicates the resources in that primary location and the method used to get files (master and transaction) between the two sites - such as high-bandwidth network connections. The best DRP/BCP strategies follow a “redundant every-thing” philosophy throughout the data center. Multiple mainframes and servers should run in the production and backup data facilities. Then, if a component in the production system encounters problems, it immediately fails over to the local backup as a first line of defense. Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.
Consolidation and Disaster Planning
Most organizations today are faced with conflicting goals and challenges. They have geographically distributed workforces, with headquarters, datacenters, branch offices, and mobile workers scattered widely. Everyone needs to access email, file shares, and mission critical applications, and the speed of access directly ties to employee productivity. So computing resources have been widely deployed in many locations to give the local workers the best possible service delivery. However, this approach is now seen as wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy and maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to support the systems. As budgets get tighter, organizations are looking for solutions to handle this burden. IT consolidation is the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center as a way to cut costs and boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate without hurting the performance for the end users. While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations, it will take more than just a Friday afternoon toensure that your consolidation, disaster recovery, and business continuity projects are truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly planned project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place. Lay out a change and risk management strategy Develop a plan for resiliency Test (and improve) branch office performance & local consolidation Architect a forward-looking infrastructure & support plan Plan a phased roll-out
Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPOD) is an issue
The concept of Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPOD) is an issue with the introduction of British Standard 25999-2. When applied appropriately, MTPOD will improve management’s understanding of your disaster recovery business continuity program and clarifies your enterprise’s recovery priorities. BS 25999-2, Section 4 says that the goal of a business impact analysis is to “determine the impact of any disruption of the activities that support the organization’s key products and services.” A key aspect of determining the impact of a disruption is identifying what BS 25999 calls the “Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption,” or MTPOD. BS 25999 defines MTPOD as the “duration after which an organization’s viability will be irrevocably threatened if product and service delivery cannot be resumed.” MTPOD is the maximum amount of time that the organization’s key products or services can be unavailable or undeliverable before its stakeholders realize unacceptable consequences. The full application of this concept can mean rethinking how a business impact analysis is approached. While many DRP / BCP professionals start a business impact analysis by gathering data from individual departments, MTPOD forces them to first look at products and services. Disaster Recovery and Business continuity professionals should understand downtime tolerance, taking into account: Customer expectations Regulatory requirements Reputational issues Financial and operational impairment Strategic consequences. Based on management input, disaster recovery / business continuity professionals can propose preliminary Maximum Tolerable Periods of Disruption for key products or services within the scope of the business continuity program. Once MTPOD is established for key products and services, the traditional business impact analysis or service. From there, the business impact analysis can either validate or disagree with preliminary MTPOD conclusions. In addition, the business impact analysis does identify the department, function and process details that are needed to achieve the MTPOD. Perhaps most importantly, the disaster recovery / business continuity professional must understand the amount of time required to perform the process or activity in order to deliver the product or service to its key stakeholders (internal or external). This is referred to as cycle time. For example, in a manufacturing company, cycle time would be how long it takes to obtain the necessary stock, manufacture the product, and deliver it to the customer. With an understanding of MTPOD and cycle time, the business continuity professional can identify what is commonly accepted as the core output of the business impact analysis - the recovery time objective, or RTO. RTO is the point in time following a disruption when operations must resume (at a minimum level) in order to meet downtime tolerances.
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Credit Card Processor Disaster
Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net was down several hours. The service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites. A fire in Seattle s Fisher Plaza appears to be the reason what has taken down Authorize.net. With its website down, Authorize has set up a new Twitter account to provide updates and address the many customer complaints and questions. On July 2nd at approximately 11:10 pm, an incident in a garage-level electrical room disrupted power to Fisher Plaza East and knocked out the facility’s backup generation system. The electrical room is where Fisher Plaza East receives its power from Seattle City Light. One of the services affected was Authorize.net, the largest credit card and e-check payment processor in the world, with tens of thousands of partners and processing millions of transactions on a daily basis. Authorize.net set up a Twitter account to keep its customers informed and transaction processing has been restored with a backup data center. ARB transactions will be rerun over the weekend thought there are still issues with CIM, VPOS and api.authorize.net.
UK Pandemic system for disaster fails
The UK Government has rolled out the National Pandemic Flu Service in England today. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have decided to opt out of the service as demands in numbers are significantly less than that of England. According to the BBC, the UK may have over 100,000 cases of H1N1 infection along with roughly 30 deaths as a result. The US is reported to have 40,000 cases with over 250 deaths. But because the flu pandemic has spread so far and wide, it is difficult to determine whether someone s death is a direct result from swine flu, or whether the figures and statistics are accurate. There are simply too many cases and not enough resources being spent on data collection; some would say at least governments have their priorities right. The National Pandemic Flu Service will be primarily a web based service, alongside a call center which will not be operated by health staff or qualified professionals to allow an “ease of burden on the NHS”. It will act as a checklist service that algorithmically determines whether your symptoms are severe enough to require Tamiflu, the main anti-viral drug used to combat the illness.
Backup Window Must be Planned For
Rather than add more bandwidth, or invest in expensive, dedicated storage networks, WAN optimization can improve IP network performance sufficient to turn recovery into continuity. To help meet the objectives outlined above, a WAN optimization solution must be able to do three separate tasks for true business continuity: restrict bandwidth to backup applications during the allowed window and allocate it to critical applications in the event of a disaster, overcome latency and bandwidth limitations on the wire, and provide acceleration to roaming or displaced users redirected to alternative data sources. Regardless of whether the data is being replicated from a massive cabinet, over IP-based storage or off a user s hard drive for compliance purposes, during the backup window maximum bandwidth should be available to ensure completion. This requires granular bandwidth management that can isolate applications on the network and provide a predictable, policy-based service level. Further, the solution should be able to distinguish between a user initiated file copy and one started by the backup daemon, and apply different bandwidth allocations to each. Also, the solution must remove latency and protocol inefficiencies that constrain current WAN backups. Caching and compression technology combined with inline protocol optimization of commonly used file transfer protocols form a technology suite that improves the performance characteristics of a WAN, adding bandwidth and reducing the time needed to complete backups and restores. Moreover, it should be able to do this for individual devices and accommodate displaced and roaming users without the need for bulky appliances.
