Data Center Disaster Recovery Through Redundant Systems

Data centers can be pictured as the ‘heart’ and Information Storage as the ‘arteries’ of present day businesses. A clogged information artery can, at any time, cause a heart attack for your company. Sincere attempts to avert such situations in most companies are usually in the form of huge investments in data solutions, while getting only marginal data center protection.

Gartner Group studies reveal that close to 40% of the businesses that undergo catastrophic data loss or data center downtime never recover from it. And 2 out of every 5 businesses die when faced with such catastrophes. This spotlights the significance of disaster recovery in data centers.

Why are disaster recovery plans critical elements for every business? And why is redundancy chosen as a better recovery plan over other DR plans?

Manmade and natural disaster risks always hang over the heads of businesses, ready to wreck the organization anytime. An effective disaster recovery plan ensures that the business systems and information are safeguarded even in case of IT failures.

With redundant systems, the business critical programs and data are backed up securely on a secondary server. This ensures that primary data center disasters do not affect the data and the information can be completely restored, faster than from any other DR options. Even in the case of disasters, secondary backup systems allow seamless transitions from the primary systems. This in fact guarantees less data center downtime and increases employees’ productivity by eliminating duplicate efforts towards recovering lost data.

However, main factors preventing businesses from employing redundant data center systems are extra space requirements, the cost involved and the maintenance of secondary IT systems. But what’s more costly? The loss of a business or the protection of all of your data?

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.