September 25

Planning for Disaster — a tip

We often talk about making sure that your disaster recovery plan and your backups are in place, they’re tested, and someone’s checking the log files. If we’re very good, and by good I mean we’re being good boys, we will also have a plan to review the backup and do some test restores.

However, sometimes when people are purchasing new hardware and software packages, they don’t think about being able to restore to different machines and different environments. In a real world situation where a server goes out and you need to reinstall from a backup tape or from backup disks, you’re going to have a brand new machine you use for installation. The machine may be somewhere else in your office, but it’s brand new to the code and the software that you’re installing.

Make sure when you’re planning your IT budgets that you look at buying enough machinery or horsepower to be able to do restores on completely different equipment. This may involve using a product like VMware because you can virtualize the entire process. It should make it simpler and easier.

So again, keep in mind, put enough dollars in your budget to have new equipment or large enough equipment to run in a virtual environment.