|
Start Here: Basic DR
For today’s small and mid-sized businesses, the risk and effects from any unplanned outage (downtime) grow with each additional critical application, network enhancement or system upgrade. We don’t have to look back very far to see the consequences of sudden or unexpected disasters affecting the IT infrastructure of major cities and businesses of every description.
Consequently, IT managers have been—or soon will be tasked—to find ways to mitigate, eliminate or minimize as cost-effectively as possible the risks and effects of unplanned outages on the business. And, even more important, their executives will want assurances that information assets—data and applications—can remain available no matter what happens.
This white paper will help you ensure business continuity and survival by leading you through three essential steps—from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime.
We will discuss in general terms the concepts of business continuity and disaster planning. We will focus primarily on specific IT strategies you can easily and affordably implement.
Bottom line: Disaster recovery plans and data replication alone are not enough. You will want to look for the most effective way to ensure the optimum level of business uptime for your organization. This white paper will help you match your specific optimum uptime objectives with the best availability choice.
Step 1: Getting Started
Before you begin reviewing the available technologies that support disaster recovery, you first must consider the business. You need to identify which business processes are most important to keeping your business operational.
Once you have identified the most critical business processes, work with the business units to determine their availability requirements for each process. Document the requirements in an internal SLA that specifies the availability goals for each process and articulates the costs of not meeting the goals. For example:
At company A, the order entry and shipping departments require that their information infrastructure processes must be functional 24 hours every day of the year except corporate holidays. If this requirement is not met, the company loses 80 percent of its productivity, which translates to $10,000 (US) per hour plus penalties of $100,000 per hour for every hour the processes are unavailable.
At company B, the payroll department requires that their information infrastructure processes must be functional from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Not meeting this requirement costs the company 50 percent of their productivity, which translates to $1000 (US) per hour of downtime.
Another organization, company C has the need to comply with strict information availability requirements due to government regulations and has made it imperative that its applications remain available even during routine backup processes.
Documenting the cost of not meeting availability requirements helps you determine the value of a software investment used to improve availability. This information also helps you prioritize the processes to analyze. After documenting the service levels required, you can start analyzing the availability needs of each business process technology by technology.
Understanding Downtime and Availability
Most organizations define “availability” somewhere along a continuum between multiple hours of downtime with significant data loss to real-time 24/7 uptime with zero data loss. Your definition depends on your business needs, your data and application requirements and your organizational structure. The goal, however, should be to prevent the inevitable system downtime from affecting business uptime.
There are two types of downtime: unplanned and planned.
Unplanned Downtime
Surprisingly, unplanned downtime represents less than 5-10 percent of all downtime. These events include security violations, corruption of data, power outages, human error, failed upgrades, natural disasters and the like. Some forms of unplanned downtime, such as hardware failure, pose a lessening threat to availability as most servers today offer exceptional reliability. For example, IBM®’s System i® servers provide more than 99.9 percent documented reliability and average 61 months between failures—more than five years of server uptime.
Unplanned downtime can strike at any time from any number of causes. Although natural disasters may appear to be the most devastating cause of IT outages, application problems are the most frequent threat to IT uptime. According to Gartner, people and process problems cause an estimated 80 percent of unexpected application downtime.
|
