SearchDisasterRecovery: Top 10 IT disaster recovery planning tips of 2009

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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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.