The 2010 Haiti earthquake killed more than 210,000 people, and approximately 1 million people were evacuated from their homes. That disaster was followed about a month later by the 2010 Chilean earthquake, which scientists said shifted the earth’s axis, and generated a blackout that affected 93% of the country and lasted for several days in some areas. And more recently, the death toll from China’s recent earthquake is nearing 2,400 according to reports.

In the aftermath of Katrina and other hurricanes a few years back, IT staffs in certain geographic areas made hurricane preparation a top priority in IT disaster recovery (DR) planning.

These earthquakes in Haiti and Chile should prompt IT organizations to look at how they’re prepared to survive earthquakes, just as Katrina and other hurricanes a few years back made hurricane preparation a top priority in IT disaster recovery planning in certain geographic areas.

more of the SearchDisasterRecovery article from Heather Darcy

A new Forrester Research Inc. report by Stephanie Balaouras examines the lack of progress made in data center disaster recovery since the September 11 attacks in 2001 and, more recently Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

According the report’s summary drawn from Forrester’s Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey,about 27% of enterprises in North America And Europe in Q3 of 2007 do not have a recovery site. Additionally, “23% of enterprises never test their disaster recovery plans, and 40% test their plans once per year.” Balaouras says this data points to a failure to make the business case for disaster recovery.

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Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and other large IT providers insist that data center customers want to deal with fewer, bigger vendors for more of their IT needs. But many IT pros say this “one throat to choke” mantra is self-serving at best and often demonstrably false.

Their response could be summed up this way: “Well, of course HP wants to sell me my servers, my switches, my routers, my storage. But why would I want to source all that from HP, if its storage and networking gear is not up to snuff? Cisco Systems is now, famously, in the server market, but why would I want to trust my data center to a newbie server provider? I want the best server, the best router, the best storage and they come from different vendors.”

In fact, most IT pros say that the mere presence of multiple vendors in their shops ensures that they get better pricing and service from each.

The more throats the better for IT support, pricing
“I have found that to keep a vendor honest and hungry for your business, you should have some competition on-site,” said an IT manager at a large New England medical center.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Barbara Darrow

Do you have hardened data center facilities for disaster recovery purposes? What are your true risks? How does your disaster recovery center protect your business?

Gulfport Municipal Court streamlined its infrastructure after Hurricane Katrina destroyed numerous court documents, investing in a digital imaging solution and storing data in multiple sites to prevent such a disastrous loss from ever happening again.

When Hurricane Katrina roared its murderous path into Mississippi and Louisiana in August 2005, the howling winds and punishing rains destroyed lives, homes and businesses—and temporarily blinded Lady Justice in Gulfport, Miss.

The storm, which caused more than 1,800 deaths and more than $81 billion in damages nationwide, tore the roof off the Gulfport Municipal Court, water-logging files and destroying the walls that housed them. Years of supporting documentation in criminal and civil complaints became sodden and illegible.

more of the Baseline article from Alison Diana

As we are all aware, a business continuity plan is only effective if it accurately reflects the needs, technology and structure of the organization. But, more importantly, a business continuity plan can only be considered to be truly effective if the content and the components of the plan have been exercised.

Continuous exercising ensures that there are no gaps or issues; that the key people involved in either the emergency response and / or business recovery teams are fully aware of their respective roles and responsibilities; and helps ensure that teams will interact effectively during a major operational disaster.

I am often asked what is required to ensure that an exercise is effective? In essence the key components of an effective exercise can be broken down into three simple activities:

1. Planning and preparation
2. The exercise itself
3. Exercise outcomes and remediation.

more of the Continuity Central article By Chris Bakowski

Late last year a high-street financial institution experienced a power failure at an IT centre in Yorkshire, shutting down cash machines for a few hours, as well as undermining retail transactions and online banking. This incident was only the latest in a telling series of power failures affecting UK organizations including ISPs, hospitals and financial trading firms, highlighting the growing need for effective assessment of risks and disaster scenarios. This encompasses effective IT infrastructure planning, provision of power supplies and environmental concerns influencing organizations’ daily operations.

The scope for knock-on effects such as system failure and critical data loss has been intensified in recent years by the expansion, complexity and power constraints on ICT infrastructures as ‘UK plc’ migrates an increasing proportion of business processes and systems online. In 2008 Gartner made a global prediction that half of data centres will start to run out of effective power supplies. However, local conditions often present more immediate difficulties.

more of the Continuity Central article from Chris Smith

One of the biggest challenges IT managers face today is increased demand on data centers. New technologies, security threats and compliance requirements have forced many IT execs to consider other data center options, from consolidation to IT outsourcing options such as cloud computing and colocation providers.
In the past, when large budgets, venture capital investments and growing revenues reigned supreme, solving data center overutilization problems was a simple matter of building a bigger and better data center. With today’s economic downturn, that solution just won’t fly. Data center managers have found themselves dealing with annoying details, such as return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO), before the CFO loosens funding for any project, particularly breaking ground on a new data center facility.

IT execs must perform due diligence before proposing a solution an over-utilized data center, and that requires a long, hard look at the problem and all available options. With data centers, there are many paths to consider.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Frank J. Ohlhorst

Take Bob Zandoli, chief information security officer (CISO) at MetLife Inc. He spearheaded an ambitious disaster recovery strategy that ultimately reduced the insurance company’s recovery time objective from 28 hours to six hours and its potential data loss from 41 hours to 15 minutes. These improvements in data loss and recovery time required shifting from a single recovery site with off-site tape storage to establishing a second recovery site with remote disk mirroring.

“It wasn’t a matter of, ‘Go build it.’ It was a matter of how can we seize opportunities to make it cost as a little as possible,” said Zandoli, a vice president of strategic planning services at MetLife before his recent appointment to CISO.

more of the SearchCIO article from Linda Tucci

It’s no secret that building up effective disaster recovery (DR) capabilities is peppered with challenges. From identifying business requirements and mapping them to non-budget-busting technology solutions to coping with the operational impact of disaster recovery planning and testing, it seems that every step of the process introduces hurdles to overcome.

At the same time, surveys highlight that the increased impact of outages and business demand for improved uptime places more pressure on IT to do something to improve the state of disaster recovery within their organization(s). On the bright side, technology options for DR are increasing and becoming more and more cost-effective. The widespread adoption of server virtualization, an increased variety of options for networked storage and lower bandwidth costs are encouraging more organizations to renew their efforts to improve their DR practices. However, when trying to improve disaster recovery, there are steps that newcomers may miss and even old-timers may not adequately consider. So I’ve provided some of the best practices to help you avoid DR interdependency predicaments.

more of the SearchDisasterRecovery article from James Damoulkis

Information technology (IT) disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans and testing are critical aspects in storage enterprises today. Without having a DR plan to fall back on, many companies and organizations could find themselves in trouble with data loss or a security breach. To help keep organizations away from disasters, vendors continue to improve and come up with new DR technologies.

Several improvements and trends have been apparent in disaster recovery technologies in 2009. “I think the one significant trend in DR this year is better support within virtualization products, specifically VMware’s SRM [Site Recovery Manager] 4,” said Ray Lucchesi, president of Silverton Consulting.

“It’s apparent that as server virtualization goes up the market into more and more mission-critical applications, DR becomes more important.” Another trend Lucchesi noticed this year was “more sophisticated data storage replication capabilities.”

But perhaps the most important pattern that surfaced from disaster recovery this year was the importance of testing DR plans. “DR plan adequacy can only be determined by testing it out,” said Lucchesi. “This can be as simple as a desk check of the plan or as complex as a complete run through. But it must be done on a periodic basis to catch those changes to your data center environment that have happened since the last test.”

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