The “R” part of “DR”
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher by Joe DisherWith all the talk of DR (Disaster Recovery) on vendor websites, e-magazines and other blogs - and the seemingly endless backup and recovery options that are available for customers today, it’s shocking to me how many horror stories I still hear from people that have recent experiences of some sort of catastrophic failure and they are unable to recover the way they thought they could.
Now I’m probably one of the biggest customer advocates I know, sometimes to a fault… but, in my opinion this is a prime example of people being lazy or stupid! I don’t really think people are being stupid – so that just leaves lazy. I am truly tired of hearing the complaints about how their backup software doesn’t do what they want it to do, or that the DR site replication is too slow so they don’t do it as much as they should, or that they just don’t have time to test to make sure they can successfully recover from a disaster. It’s all a bunch of double talk as far as I’m concerned. Granted, larger companies can afford to have larger teams that are dedicated to ensuring data recoverability, but everyone (especially at smaller companies) that’s responsible for making sure the “crown jewels” of the company are safe MUST have a tested recovery plan that meets the business needs.
Without coming up with any complex mathematical equations to show why this is something that has to be done – I will offer this as my argument: Can you put a dollar value on all of the data YOU personally create as part of your own daily activities? For me – it’s priceless. I create so many iterations of different documents, spreadsheets and PowerPoint’s that it would be excruciating for me to have to try to recreate even 1/100th of it. Not to mention the value of the data for my company. So if your in charge of the security, storage or backup of data for your company and the “reinvention” of all or part of the data is as painful to your end users as it is for me, I think it would make good sense to; (a) put a few steps into your daily routine to make sure corporate data is properly backed up and secure (almost everyone does this); (b) go to the trouble to make sure you’ve either consolidated desktop/laptop data to a central location for backup or backup the clients themselves (hardly anyone does this); and (c) at least twice a year go through a full blown recovery scenario verifying that your backups do what you think they are doing.
This “blame someone else” attitude reminds of something my uncle always told me growing up: “You can spend your whole life going to school to get smarter, but if you don’t have any common sense, you’re going to do a lot of really stupid things.”
So let’s all start the “common sense” campaign everyone! If you’re responsible for backing up your data then you’re responsible for making sure you can recover it!
Blog ya later!
Joe
November 14th, 2005 at 7:39 am
There was a pretty good effort afoot a couple of years ago to sort out the options and lay performance numbers on various reference models to help guide consumers.
It was called the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative and I was part of it as “Consumer Ombudsman”. We had a lot of buy-in from desperate consumers — so much so that we got on SNIA’s radar as a competitor. They quickly embargoed the group, telling members not to join the handful of vendors who had formed the thing, and basically strangled it to death. (Actually, they co-opted it into a SNIF, led by Michael Peterson, that has gone virtually nowhere.)
Maybe part of the reason why consumers seem to still be rather lax in doing storage DR is because technology options continue to be presented in confusing manner, full of marketecture and hype.
January 30th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Dude, that’s quite the rant