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F E A T U R E

Storage Disaster: Will You Recover?

March 5, 2001
By Jon William Toigo

Executive Summary

Disaster Recovery

A solid recovery plan is the first step toward saving your business in the event of a storage disaster. Actual downtime can cost a company as much as $3 million per hour. The faster you get back online, the less time and money you'll lose. This cover package has four key components: our overview of the industry; an analysis of five storage-backup proposals, a tutorial that outlines the basics of scheduling tape backups and a case study that explores one energy company's full-redundancy strategy.

To help you find a partner that will keep your data safe, we sent an RFI (request for information) to 11 vendors. Of those, Exodus Communications, Hewlett-Packard Business Recovery Services (BRS), IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS), SunGard Recovery Services, and Storability responded to the plea of fictional manufacturer Terrific T-Shirts, offering plans that ranged from a strong road map that would leave implementation to the manufacturer, to a completely hosted, mirrored infrastructure. Ultimately, we gave the winning nod to Storability's solution, which would help Terrific T-Shirts migrate toward a managed storage infrastructure that could prevent disaster before it strikes.

Scheduling tape backups for both efficiency and completeness is essential to any tape-backup plan. When daily backups become unmanageable, it's time to consider both incremental and differential backup schemes. Rebuilding a server from these backups can be tedious, but products such as Legato NetWorker can help.

In many cases, however, tape backup is just not enough -- especially when the company in question serves millions of people every day. That's when a full, symmetrically mirrored redundancy scheme, such as the one employed by KeySpan Energy Corp., is the best option. That company uses the proximity of its sites, its fiber network and its centralized storage infrastructure to its advantage. Our case study examines the choices its IT managers made in coming up with a truly disaster-ready business-continuity plan.