Blog
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23 February 2010
This weekend I read an article by Rachel Lebeaux who wrote an article on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. She referred to the big problems that Wordpress.com – a leading worldwide blogging platform - experienced last Thursday. For a full 110 minutes (nearly two hours!) the whole Wordpress blogging platform was down. This meant that 10,2 million personal and business blogs were down. An estimated 5,5 million page views were lost. The reason according to the official Wordpress.com blog was: “...but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.”
It makes clear that Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are more than some abstract articles in some legal paper. Or as Abe Wachsman, senior vice president of IT at Atlantis Health Plan Inc. put it in an interview on searchcio.com: ...is not that we are doing business continuity and disaster recovery to satisfy some abstract requirement," Wachsman said. "We are doing this to ensure that we can continue to exist as a business, because the business has value."
Taking this information and put it in the perspective of your SharePoint or Zimbra environment, what for impact will it have on your organization, or the organization of your client if a minor or major ‘disaster’ hits SharePoint’s SQL Server or the fileservers of Zimbra? Of course you have got backup procedures in place, but how sure are you that all tapes are in place? Missing one tape or one tape being defective indicates loss of data, maybe irreplaceable loss of valuable data. And how about restore times? If your content storage has taken up sizable proportions it might take multiple hours or even days to have all content restored. What are these implications on the organization? Your company or your client not being able to access its valuable data and content because backup tapes are busy restoring. What are the costs of such a situation? And how can you best minimize the risk of such a situation?
In general Disaster Recovery is seen as something that is part of a SLA, something legal. So how do you get budget for something ‘hypothetical’? Well, don’t talk about Disaster Recovery, talk about Business Continuity. Storing your content in an external storage (or private cloud storage if you like to use that word) will dismiss your need to ‘recover’ as all the stored content is automatically copied in the storage space. So to ensure that Business Continuity is not at stake is to take measures that will support Business Continuity: to migrate your data to a new storage infrastructure. An infrastructure that will automatically will tackle the backup and restore issue, whilst your mission will be saving costs on storage and maintenance and improving performance of business processes. A nice piggyback ride.
Neither SharePoint nor Zimbra offer an Out of the Box connection to an external storage platform. STEALTH Content Store can do the trick for you. As STEALTH Content Store connects with different kinds of external storage platforms like Caringo CAStor, ParaScale, Windows Azure, EMC Atmos and Amazon S3, you have full freedom of choice what kind of external storage infrastructure you would like to adopt.
If the backup and recovery of your company’s SharePoint or Zimbra content is high on your list, why not give us a call or contact us via our site. We can discuss your matter and offer you solutions that fit your business situation the best.
Feel free to comment and give me your views on this matter.
Download information on our STEALTH SharePoint Storage Guide, visit our Knowledge Center.
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