Disaster Recovery Overview

Disaster Recovery (DR), is a collection of process, policies and procedures applied during and after a natural or human-induced disaster, in order to restore critical business operations so that the business doesn't come to a halt. These critical businesses activities entail but are not limited to resuming access (records, hardware, software, etc.), incoming and outgoing communications, workspace and a host of other businesses processes.

Information technology and computing services have seen a sharp rise and proliferation in every sphere of human activity. While this trend has come as a boon to everyone including businesses, at the same time reliance on computer technology has brought a whole new gamut of business risk. The importance of a disaster recovery mechanism for protection of business-critical information stored on computers systems, simply can't be overstated.

According to a research published by the Disaster Recovery Journal, most of the large corporate entities spend between 2% and 4% of their Information Technology budget on a disaster recovery plan. The reasoning behind taking such proactive measures for data protection are well founded, as out of all the companies which have suffered a major loss of computerized data, 43% have simply died, 51% have closed within just two years, and only 6% were able to survive in the long run.

The the most common disaster planning techniques entail:

• A backup taken and sent off-site at regular intervals (preferably daily)
• A backup made on-site and automatically copied to off-site storage, sometimes copied directly to off-site storage.
• Replication of data to an off-site location, this usually makes use of Storage Area Network (SAN) technology.
• High availability systems which keep both the data as well as the system replicated off-site.
• Sometimes, companies choose an outsourced Disaster Recovery provider as a means of data protection and data recovery.
• Fire Prevention measures viz. more alarms, accessible fire extinguishers are often the uncrowned kings of disaster recovery planning.
• A very basic, but invaluable means of disaster recovery planning is the to us quality anti-virus software.

Other disaster recovery measures include:

• Building local mirrors of systems/data and use of disk protection technology e.g RAID for facilitating data recovery.
• Using Surge Protectors so as to minimize the effects of power surges on sensitive electronic equipment.
• Employing Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)/Backup Generator to keep systems running even if there's a power failure.

The disaster recovery solutions from Riverbed effectively accelerate all backup and replication applications utilizing TCP. The Disaster Recovery Acceleration, powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), has shown to cut backup windows by as much as three times. Consequently, the WAN bandwidth usage is reduced by a margin of 60 to 95%.

These significant performance enhancements from Riverbed's products ensure that organizations' network-based backup is continuously and effectively carried out, and that too without an undesirable intervention with other applications on the WAN. Further, the need for tape backup devices is also eliminated.

Riverbed's appliances are perfectly adapted, but not limited to the following vendors' products: EMC, Network Appliance, Legato, Veritas, Tivoli, Microsoft, CommVault, DoubleTake and CA. Moreover, these solutions have found their way everywhere from 5-person offices with fractional T1/E1 lines to large data centers with huge bandwidths, installations of these appliances even in moving vehicles such as ships connected via satellite are not an exception.

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