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Here is a disaster recovery scenario: Your servers are all down. The computer room is dark. A major catastrophe has occurred and you need to determine what to do next. What are your priorities? What should you do first? In what order should you begin your server recovery? Everything is a business priority, according to the business experts. Quick, lock the doors because a rush of self proclaimed experts is about to come bursting into the computer room and start barking out orders. Are you going to listen to the person with the loudest yell and get his server back up and running first? If not, what IS your top priority? The computer systems may or may not be recoverable in the short term. Maybe they are not available longer term either. You take a deep breath and tell yourself this is what your team has been documenting and practicing for many years. But does your current disaster recovery plan include prioritization of server recovery in a disaster? Managing Mission Critical Servers for Business Continuity There is a lot of work that goes into determining the on-going requirements for mission critical servers. When you have downtime, whatever the cause, data is unavailable to your customers, and this frequently means that business - yours and your customers’ -- simply stops. When business stops, it gets very expensive in a hurry. This is why critical server requirements should be reviewed twice a year to ensure that approved server processes are being carried out to support the true needs of the business and that those identified servers are still in alignment with business goals and priorities. Listed below are the elements that should be reviewed regularly to support the critical server definition requirements. • Business impact analysis and risk assessment • Strategy for server recovery • Change in prioritization based on different business cycles • Application dependencies and interdependencies • Application downtime considerations for planned and unplanned outages • Backup procedures • Offsite storage for vital records • Data retention policies • Recovery time objectives (RTO) • Recovery point objectives (RPO ) • Hardware for critical server recovery • Alternate recovery site selection • IT and business management signoff Classifying Systems for Disaster Recovery Priority In a typical corporate computer room it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the number of servers. You'll likely find many hardware platforms are powered on and ready to perform their jobs. Very often the servers will include several hardware generations. What’s essential is a planned roadmap and prioritized recovery of your complete critical server infrastructure. You need to be familiar with the basic business needs of all servers in advance of any disaster ever occurring. Don’t wait for that phone call at 4 a.m. to decide your server recovery strategy. All the servers inside your computer room are not equal in level of importance to your business. That is why you need to understand the difference between: · what you need · what you want to have · what you don’t need at all to run your business in a disaster. Your backup recovery team should assign server priorities as they relate to the priorities of your business. There will be a range of opinions, of course, but a good Business Impact Analysis will reveal which of those opinions carry the most weight. You should prioritize your business requirements and supporting servers as Critical, Essential, Necessary, or Optional, as follows; · Critical Systems - Absolutely these servers must be available for any business process to continue at all. These systems have a significant financial impact on the viability of your organization. Extended loss of these servers will cause a long term disruption to the business, and potentially cause legal and financial ramifications. These should be on the A-List of your disaster recovery strategy. · Essential Systems - These servers must be available to support day-to-day operations and are generally integrated with Critical Systems. These systems play an important role in delivering your business solution. These should also be on the A-List recovery strategy. · Necessary Systems - These servers contribute to improved business operations and provide improved productivity for employees. However, they are not mandatory at a time of disaster. These might include business forecasting tools, reporting, or maybe improvement tools utilized by the business. In other words, minimal business or financial impact. The targeted systems can be easily restored as part of the B-List recovery strategy. · Optional Systems - These servers may or may not enhance the productivity of your organization. Optional systems may include test systems, archived or historical data, company Intranet and non-essential complementary products. These servers can be excluded from your recovery strategy. These server classifications will offer you the baseline for your decision making matrix. The key is that your IT recovery team and your business management team must agree with the disaster recovery planning scope for classifications of the servers. By differentiating between critical, essential, necessary and optional, the reduction in the number of servers required to support the disaster recovery plan not only helps increase backup and recovery efficiency for the servers, but it also helps reduce your financial budget for disaster recovery. The Big Picture When compiling the list of mission critical applications, you must also consider application interdependencies. First, many software solutions are considered modular in design yet the software must be 100 percent intact -- in other words, fully restored to function correctly. You cannot break the applications apart from the supporting server infrastructure. You may choose not to utilize specific business features, but the entire solution must be rebuilt completely to function normally. Second, consider the flow of information. Follow the flow of a transaction from initial order to product delivery. You may find that a server not considered critical by the Business Impact Analysis does in fact have a significant role in feeding information back to another identified mission critical application. Therefore, IT input is required in addition to the defined business needs. The restoration process for most servers is usually recovered in its entirety which includes every user library saved on the system. The question then becomes, are you restoring too much? Omitting non-critical libraries can save hours, which translates to the business coming online more quickly in a disaster. The libraries and user directories that could be omitted include: • Performances data • Audit journals • Test libraries • ERP walk-through libraries • Online education • Developer libraries • User test environments • Data archives • EDI successful transmission objects • Trial software • Temporary product work directories • Auxiliary Storage Pools (ASP s) • Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools (IASP ) Required Hardware for Your Disaster Recovery Plan In the development of every disaster recovery plan, you must determine the minimum hardware requirements for your mission critical servers. Some IT professionals will say: This statement should not be accepted at face value. The real story is, only mission-critical applications absolutely need to be restored in a disaster, not everything. You need to ask whether your business will accept running the “Mission Critical “ business functions at say 50 percent less capacity or throughput. In most cases, the answer will be no -- that is totally unacceptable. In your Business Impact Analysis you identified the financial impacts for your organization of being down for an extended period of time. Running your business at half capacity will only further impede your long term business capabilities and will not ensure customer satisfaction. You would do well to reduce the disaster recovery footprint by eliminating non-essential applications rather than providing lower processing capabilities. Invest your disaster recovery budget wisely by supporting your business requirements in a disaster, which means selecting the right hardware. The last thing you want to happen is for your sales desk to tell customers you can only process half the orders right now because we had a disaster and we are still working things out. The Human Element What if you declared a disaster and your workforce didn't show? Your servers can’t recover by themselves. Many companies have plans that address their equipment requirements and recovery processes but will underestimate the number of personnel required to successfully execute their plan. Equipment works only if a person is able to operate it. In Gulf coast hurricanes, key personnel have been displaced or absent due to health risks or personal priorities. When regional disasters hit, transportation in the area can be difficult and may result in staff being unable to reach their assigned locations. Equipment may be accessible, but it will be ineffective if your staff cannot access the recovery site. What is the level of expertise your employees possess when they finally reach the recovery site? Too many companies, especially those that perform recovery tests with no more than their data center staff, will count on IT heroics to pull them out of a crisis. Expecting IT to perform a miracle in an emergency is difficult for your staff and avoidable today when full recovery tests can be performed without impacting your production users. If your disaster recovery plan includes cross departmental staffing, it is important to have detailed and precise documentation. Companies should create recovery documentation so that anyone in the business, from the shipping manager to the CFO, can start a recovery. In a well-tested plan, an employee from another department should be able to start the recovery if employees from your IT staff are unavailable. You may never know if all your key personnel will be able to assist with the recovery. After identifying your critical equipment, it is a good idea to test your disaster recovery plan with a subgroup of assigned individuals while leaving the remainder of the team to run normal business operations. Your success or failure will be a good indicator of your corporate readiness. Summary When the servers are down, your disaster recovery plan will determine the precise server recovery strategy and recovery priorities. So, lock the doors to keep the stampeding herd of users away. Ignore the distractions and start recovering the business as stated in the plan. Step through the tasks and follow the designated order of server recovery by predetermined importance criteria instead of listening to the loudest screams. And take the time required to do it right.
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About the Author Richard Dolewski is a certified systems integration specialist and disaster recovery planner. As Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Continuity Services for WTS (www.wts.com/disasterrecovery.asp) he has extensive experience in disaster recovery planning, backup and recovery program design, and high availability solutions. His recent book, System i Disaster Recovery Planning, is available on-line at amazon.com.
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