IBM Technology Brief Sample

Does your datacenter have the right procedures and equipment in place to recover your business from a disaster? Can your business survive extended downtime without your computing resources? Is your company prepared for a planned D/R event? What about an unplanned event? I’ve helped customers recover from both types of events. This article provides a place to start when considering D/R preparations for your organization.

Comfortable Circumstances
There’s a big difference between planned and unplanned D/R events. After traveling to an IBM* Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) center, I helped restore 20 AIX* machines during the 72 allocated hours. I was well-rested and well-fed. We knew the objectives ahead of time, and we took turns working and resting. Additionally, we didn't restore all of the servers in the environment, but hand-picked a cross-section of them. We modified, reviewed and tested our recovery documentation before we made the trip, and we made sure there was enough boot media to do all the restores simultaneously -- and even cut an extra set of backup tapes just in case.

We had a few minor glitches along the way, but we were satisfied that we could recover our environment. However, these results must be taken with a grain of salt, as this whole event was executed under ideal circumstances.