For any IT professional tackling Business Continuity issues, it often feels like you have suddenly been transported into an episode of the Discovery Channel’s “Survivor Man.” After all, both situations drop you into a hostile environment with a minimal set of tools and no way to get help. Your mission is not just to survive, but often to build a new solution with that minimal set of tools. The solutions often require a combination of planning and adaptation to the unique circumstances.
At the beginning of each episode, the host outlines the key risks and requirements for conquering each of the hostile environments he is about to enter. Following the classic hierarchy of needs, he discusses the type(s) of shelter that can be built, how to find/make clean drinking water and what can be eaten to stay alive. In each episode he also provides a detailed account of how to provide Human Continuance. This research is key to being able survive. The same strategy is true for Business Continuance with your IT infrastructure and the key applications in the data center. You have to know more than the basic inventory of your hardware, software and networking providers. You need to know how these elements interact and how they can be re-purposed, if required. This research will enable you to build your own minimal set of “Survivor Man” tools if you ever land in the Jungles of BC.
So what is the bare minimum to meet the formidable challenge provided by the Jungles of BC? Here are a few must haves:
• A multi-tier protection strategy for your data
• The infrastructure in place to recover to your SLAs
• A bare metal recovery process for key operating systems to reduce rebuild time
• A bare metal recovery process for key applications
• Spare disk drives and RAID controllers for storage arrays
• Extra server hardware that can run most of your key applications
• Extra Ethernet switches that can handle 50 percent loa
• A backup network provider and standby contract.
Your final list might be different, but only you can determine that. The real question is…have you spent enough time thinking about the different types of terrain your data center can throw you into and how you would get out alive to be a real Survivor Man?
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Dan Davies
Director – Applications Engineering