IT Case Study: Backup and Data Recovery

The Problem
What are the appropriate steps for your company to take in order to minimize potential interruption of business due to technology issues? This is a question all businesses must face and each year new and less expensive hardware and software is available to help manage this issue.

The disaster scenario for which we needed to prepare was the possible failure of the motherboard of our primary data server. We have hot swappable redundant hard drives (RAID 5) and an onsite spare, so the failure of a hard drive is not a major event.

Our company is not so big that we require mirrored servers with automatic failover, which is the arrangement in most data centers. But most of the scenarios to get us back up and running resulted in a down-time of three days or more. This would not be acceptable for our business.

Our Solution
For our business we concluded that we could not rely on a service technician to repair a failed server. In this scenario, the service tech may need to come to our offices to diagnose the failure, then order the part and install it when it arrived. This would likely take two to three days to repair. Further, this solution was completely out of our control. Would we get the 24 hour service? Would the part arrive overnight?

The only sure way to quickly recover from a failed server was to have an onsite spare server because ordering a new server takes a week or two to arrive. The good news is that the cost of servers are much less than they were even a few years ago. Our primary servers, which have 1.5TB of storage, are only $2,900. This is a state of the art Dell rack server and has more than twice our data storage needs.

Essential to our strategy is maintaining a current backup. We make three sets of backup data each night. We need a primary onsite backup and an onsite backup. Our backups are on brick sized USB hard drives making them very portable. So, we also have a third backup on the spare server hard drive that is bolted to the racks and behind locked doors.

The basic challenge of making a spare server work as a backup strategy is to be able to install the up-to-date operating system and all of its conguration settings along with all of the up-to-date server based programs. A great way to do this is to have an image backup of the primary server. An image backup is a snapshot of the entire primary computer. Restoring the image to a spare server makes it identical to the primary server (operating system, programs and data) as of the time the backup image was created. Further, with image software it is possible to restore the image to a hardware conguration that is different than the original server. This means the spare does not need to be identical to the original primary server.

Even with this approach it takes about 10 hours to restore our entire backup image. We have about 800GB of programs and data.

Then it Happened
Last month, we had a hardware failure on our exchange (mail) server at night. We discovered it the next morning. We had a Gateway server in place and it was still under full onsite service warranty. However, since our purchase of this server, Gateway has sold their commercial computer business to MPC Computers, which subsequently led bankruptcy and closed. We could not find anyone to speak with about the service warranty.

Fortunately we had our onsite spare server and a current backup image. We had the new server up and running as our new exchange server within two hours. This included the operating system and the exchange server program. Restoring the image of the old exchange server gave the new server the same name and IP address so no other changes were needed on the network to recognize the exchange server.

Once we had the new server up the next step was to begin restoring the data. We started the data restore and let it run overnight. We had no loss of data or e-mail whatsoever. It was a complete restoration of everything we had on the failed server. Our total downtime was 10 business hours.

Our Services
We understand the IT needs of medium and small businesses. We know that successful IT solutions must be easy to maintain and operate. In particular, a backup solution must be easily tested to verify that the data is intact and recoverable.

We provide IT consulting on a fee for service basis. As such, our customers do not need to buy expensive hardware and software solutions for us to make our money. We offer straight forward and practical advice and charge only for the time that we spend understanding and evaluating your situation.