Today’s business operates on a model that requires 100% uptime and 0% data loss. All websites, from banks and store fronts to blogs and social networking, cannot afford any downtime as it could result in loss of revenue. Data loss can require hours of recreating the data which is also unfavorable to a company’s daily operations. Many companies, large and small, have disaster recovery plans, but even fewer have disaster prevention plans. These two concepts are vital in ensuring 100% uptime and 0% data loss.

Disaster Recovery

Most people are familiar with disaster recovery, though they may not realize it. Disaster recovery is a combination of procedures and technologies that bring systems back to a working state from a disastrous failure. The disaster recovery plan for a company can be as simple as a single server with backups running, or as complicated as having a 100% survival plan that would completely recover from any number of potentially unfortunate circumstances. The most common disaster recovery technology is data backups. Data backups copy all or some data from one server to another server, off-location.  Alternatively, they can be stored on removable media such as backup tapes or hard drives.

Disaster recovery’s primary advantage is that it allows you to bring a system back online from complete failure. Hardware is not perfect and failure is not always predictable. Additionally, any other form of disasters such as fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms can cause a system to fail. A solid disaster recovery plan can alleviate the inconvenience of a hardware or weather related failure. However, the major drawback of disaster recovery is that it is slow. Restoring a single server from backups can take anywhere from 24 hours to a week, depending on the amount of data to restore and the backup technologies used. As it stands, disaster recovery does not ensure a 100% uptime but does ensure a 0% data loss.

Disaster Prevention

Disaster prevention is a combination of policies and technologies to prevent a system from going down. As stated previously, very few companies are aware of disaster prevention and even fewer actually implement it. Disaster prevention can take form in many ways, the most common being user policies. These are security permissions and internal company policies that are implemented to prevent a system from failing due to user error. Redundancy technologies are also a form of disaster prevention. These technologies provide redundant hardware and software to ensure that if one set fails, the other stays online. Redundancy technologies include hardware RAID, load balanced clusters, and off-site failovers.

Disaster prevention’s primary advantage is that it will ensure your systems are up 100% of the time. With a website, frequent hardware, software and OS maintenance may need to be performed, which requires a server to be taken offline. Redundancy allows this process without downtime via an alternate server or set of servers that continue providing the site. Also, if one server fails, the others can take over seamlessly. A large disadvantage to disaster prevention is cost. Redundancy often times means doubling or more, the operating costs of hardware, licensing, and maintenance. Smaller businesses may find it cost restrictive to implement redundancy. A company needs to evaluate the value of it’s uptime to determine viability of redundancy and no one formula fits all. However, if your primary revenue stream comes from your web presence, disaster prevention needs to be highly considered.

Which One to Use?

Neither disaster recovery nor disaster prevention alone can provide for 100% uptime and 0% downtime. Increasing more effort, time, and money will directly impact how closely a company will reach these goals. We don’t live in a perfect world and not everything can be planned. It’s important to remember technology is not a cure-all, but with the right amount of preparation and helpful tools, a company can rest relatively well, knowing their bottom line is protected.

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Tags: backups, data loss, disaster prevention, disaster recovery, load balanced clusters, natural disasters, off-site failovers, raid, redundancy, uptime

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under Industry, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.