What is disaster recovery?
Companies increasingly rely on IT services for mission-critical operations, services, and even products, any downtime because of the disaster can negatively impact revenue streams, customer satisfaction, and the overall survival of the business.Increased awareness from large-scale disasters such as tsunami, earthquake, flood, and volcanic eruption has further forced companies to think in this direction. Setting a completely separate disaster recovery site can prevent the company from the downtime and help in disaster .The result is less downtime, improved business continuity, and increased competitiveness. So disaster recovery is the process to recover the Production on alternate site.Disaster recovery also help in case of Equipment malfunction, random power outages, theft, computer viruses, and human error. Infact it has been observed only 10% times of downtime can be attributed to natural disaster.Rest 90% are due to man made errors
Here are some of the terms we use in Disaster reccovery
What is Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
Business Continuity Planning is the processes and procedures that are carried out by an organisation to ensure that essential business functions continue to operate during and after a disaster . Business Continuity Plan heldp the organisations protect their mission critical services and give themselves their best chance of survival. This type of planning gives the power to re-establish services to a fully functional level as quickly and smoothly as possible. BCPs generally cover most or all of an organisation’s critical business processes and operations.
What is Disaster Recovery plan
This plan is more at the IT level and application wise. It outlines all the steps which need to be done in order for the application to work on alternate site
Each application will have seperate disaster recovery plan for it.
How is disaster recovery is achieved.
We need to protect the data for disaster recovery and copies it to alternate site
Here are most common strategies for data protection include:
1) backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals: We take backup at the production site and sent the tape to the alternate site
2) backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk, or made directly to off-site disk
3) Storage replication of data to an off-site location: Here the data is continously replicated to alternate site using Storage technology
4) Oracle dataguard: This is more specific to Oracle database
5) Oracle goldengate : This is more specific to database but not specific to oracle database
6) Using RSYNC on unix to copy to files from Production site to Alternate site
There are many product available in the market,I have just give few options
Apart from preparing the disaster recovery sites,Organization also give important to the production site and try to mitagate the Disaster recover solution
1) local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID, Oracle ASM mirroring
2) Minmize the power surges on delicate electronic equipment
3) UPS for uninterrupted operation
4) alarms and fire extinguishers to prevent fire
5) anti-virus software and other security measures to hackproof the data
Each strategies for data protection has its own advantage and disadvantage and Time to recover is different. SO organization need to decide about the recovery strategy based on the application. Some application will work good with tape backup,Some may require storage replicati