IT department of most businesses is under the impression that the concept of near-zero data loss is an unrealistic goal to their data centers. And they continue to be a victim of disasters like an unprecedented power shutdown, natural calamities like fire, flood and so on. Setting RTOs and RPOs that help you to achieve optimal data recovery goals in a cost effective way has always been a challenge.
Is it just a theory that’s oft left only to a discussion in boardrooms but never implemented in data centers? If yes, then why is it still one of the hot topics that create buzz among IT infrastructure Technical Architects?
Read on the rest of the article to gather an insight on things that you should focus on to get your IT setup ready for any malware/disaster.
There’s more to the disastrous event than the actual data loss!
60-70% of organizations across all verticals have found it very hard to get back their business up and running smooth after their data centers failed them during the disaster. Then the company’s productivity and its brand value in the market takes a sharp dip.
There’s obviously a huge loss of revenue that might reflect this adversity in the company’s stock market too. But most of all, they end up losing customers loyalty that in many cases has made them total business failures! If you’re reading this and are an IT admin, by now you should have understood that your business could be at risk too.
So is there a solution to it? Oh yes! Let’s take a deep dive into some of the industry’s best practices that make up a near-zero data loss strategy.
Best Practices that make up the strategy:
First things first. Make sure you get a clear picture of the current status of your infrastructure.
Proper maintenance of servers:
Are your servers running way too slow at a higher latency? It’s time to check their health status of the hardware resources. If they have been running on data centers for a very long period of time, its high time you replace them with the new ones for their shelf life would have expired. Servers with the latest technology- storage systems, network configurations, and the OS will yield high performance with improved IOPS.
Backup as frequently as possible:
Configure snapshot based backups keeping in mind the stun overhead on machine performance. This should help you set the optimal RPO that defines the loss tolerance of your company in relation to data. The RPO cost of your IT infrastructure is very critical as it would determine the approximate loss of revenue that your business could suffer from.
Ensuring High Availability to critical servers:
Running servers on a Cluster Setup does help in bringing back IT operations to normalcy to a greater extent. Configuring VM level replication to critical application servers with the ability to Failover and Failback them from primary to the secondary site is very critical. Isolate those servers in your production setup and configure them to top most priority so that they are up and running smooth during a downtime.
Maintain minimal RTOs:
Analyse the target time that your IT and business activities can afford to lose after a disaster has struck. That will be your RTO. The lesser, the better. After all, managing a copy of data like that of backups is not everything. They got to be reliable for successful recovery on multiple scenarios like VM level, file & disk-level and even granular level restores for critical applications as well.
Implement the 3-2-1 backup rule:
IT specialists were under pressure to come up with a practice that could guard data against malware. That’s when this 3-2-1 rule became very common among system admins. You have to retain 3 copies of data on 2 different medias- external HDD and Tape and one on an Offsite location preferably on the cloud. Thus even if your primary servers go down or data on primary storage gets infected with a malware, you still would have two copies of data that can eventually be recovered.
Site Recovery & Live Migration from storage targets:
What if your primary site is down and you’ve got to access application databases on servers that just got crashed? Now, in a similar scenario, a redundant copy of the same application if stored on a DR site can help a lot. They can even help you to reconstruct your production setup from scratch.
Talking about live migration, the flexibility to use VMware’s Storage vMotion can actually save a lot of time as it directly migrates VMs from storage targets.
Well, this post isn’t just enough to cover another set of key points that you shouldn’t miss out, knowing how Vembu can help you achieve your goal.
If you’re trying to figure out how to implement the above-discussed recommendations on your IT setup, let me just remind- you are at the right place. And for you to experience the improved productivity of your IT department happening around, shouldn’t you be at the right time too?
This coming week, join our experts on a live webinar to unravel a lot more tips and best practices that would help your data centers implement the near-zero data loss strategy that minimises RPOs and RTOs in a cost-effective way. Click here to register.
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