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Fear, Loathing and Hyper-V Backup Disaster Recovery Planning

Fear, Loathing and Hyper-V Backup Disaster Recovery Planning

A Contributed Article By Joseph Hand, Senior Director of Product Strategy at AppAssure Software

One of the most overused and abused statements used to scare small and medium-size businesses into buying a disaster recovery plan for Hyper-V backup - or any other backup for that matter - goes something like this:

"According to ‘XYZ Institute', 70% of businesses who suffer a data disaster lasting longer than three days will go out of business within X months."

These and similar statements are usually written by backup and recovery software makers who do a Google search on "disaster recovery statistics" and decide to reuse quotes developed on other disaster recovery software sites. Following these statements to their source almost always proves futile, and if you can track the statement to its source, as I have, it's common to find the statement was based on a published figure that may be seven to 10 years old, the equivalent of nearly two IT generation of computing.

Still there's a kernel of truth to it all

While these statements perpetuate a myth, there is, as with any myth, a kernel of truth: you have a right to be afraid if you, your customers, and your partners lose access to your application data for an extended period of time. How long exactly depends on an evaluation of each application and how important it is to your internal staff, your customers and the partners who are tied into it. Whether you're looking for Windows Server backup and recovery, VMware backup server recovery or Hyper-V backup server recovery, here are four steps you can take to get your own DR plan off the ground and reduce the fear and loathing you may have for the hard work it entails.

  • Prioritize on recovering first those applications everyone depends on first, like Exchange Server email and SQL applications, along with mission-critical infrastructural components like your domain controller. Move down the list to more static back office functional areas that you can put on a secondary recovery tier, like a Human Resources application.
  • Concentrate on protecting all these resources from a single management point. If you've recently virtualized some of your physical servers, it's likely you used a different backup and recovery product to protect them than whatever you already employ to protect your physical machines or another virtual platform you may also be running. This can come back to bite you in a disaster recovery situation, where pressure is high and a quick recovery can make the difference between an annoyance and significant lost revenue. It's always better to try to consolidate all of your disaster recovery under a single solution. After all, a single solution is much easier to master than two or three, and it's cheaper to pay for and easier administer one product.
  • Keep your recovery plan up to date. Using the same example as above, let's say you've gone through a significant virtualization effort in 2011. Are your new machines as well protected as your existing stable of machines? Review your plan at least annually and be safe.
  • Practice, Practice, Practice!
  • It works for every profession, whether you're a soldier going out on combat, a baseball power hitter taking cuts in the batting cage or an IT administrator encountering a fire or flood in the server room. If you've practiced, you're more likely to be able to recover successfully. In the end, that matters the most, both for your company and for your job. Quarterly "events" and annual DR simulations will keep you sharp, and you'll learn in advance what needs to be fixed before you really need to find out if your Hyper-V backup software is capable of delivering a successful disaster recovery.

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About the Author

 

Joseph Hand is the Senior Director of Product Strategy at AppAssure Software, focusing on virtualization for AppAssure's VMware backup and Hyper-V backup platforms and how they can work together to leverage technology to solve today's problems facing the modern day enterprise.

PS: Did you like this post? If so, be sure to leave a comment below.

Published Wednesday, January 25, 2012 6:30 AM by David Marshall
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